Coffee heat rising

Ever wonder if you’ve blown a fuse?

Do you ever wonder if at some point along the line you’ve blown a mental fuse? Slipped a cog? Dropped off the trolley cable?

Lately, “competence” does not seem to be my middle name. I never functioned at the level of one of those astonishing admins who keeps a department together and running with Scotch tape and paper clips. But as I recall, I wasn’t a total fool.

And also lately — much more to the point — it seems to me that I’m not getting things done at the rate I used to. It’s more like I can’t get them done in the time I’m accustomed to expecting. And one interruption — just one, dammit — will throw a whole day off, insuring that absolutely positively nothing gets done.

Today the schedule looked like this:

Collect last six Fire-Rider stories and lay them out for Kindle publication
Obtain ISBN for the same
Convert to Mobi format; proofread; fix; reconvert
Post to Amazon
Lay out first FR collection for print production at new PoD guy’s site
Check to see if diet/cookbook proofs are ready; drive to south Phoenix, proof, approve (I hope) and order books for sale
Walk dogs
Try again to buy ads on SBTB
Search for similar website for speculative fiction or sagas
Work on establishing presence on Goodreads

But instead, here’s how it’s gone:

Write, by email, a detailed explanation for ad manager of why I dislike and distrust Faceboook and what leads me to believe, despite her assurances to the contrary, that some risk exists for posts to any page established in my FB account to be distributed to my “friends” on the page that has nothing to do with racy books; explain why Racy Books writers and I established a “secret” page to avoid that happening
Make a decision about what to do next in the ad campaign, if anything, now that FB has screwed us. Explain in detail to ad manager
Write a post on the Facebook page for The Copyeditor’s Desk, which I had forgotten
Correspond with reader who wants to buy a copy of 30 Pounds/4 months
Correspond with accountant and with Web guru over whether Web guru needs to get a 1099
Pick up mess before cleaning lady gets here
File loose paperwork
Get email from client summoning me to meet with him to kill another afternoon going over every one of my edits, and to discuss cost of P&S Press producing his book in hard copy…AT 2 P.M. TODAY
Prepare a two-page estimate of costs, broken down by task and comparing our estimate with the going rates posted at various sites on Google
Throw on my clothes
Paint my face
Set and comb my hair
Bolt down a few bites of cold roast chicken
Fly out the door

Nothing else is going to get done today.

 

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