And now for something mostly different: a mid-week post. As I reconfigure my other website/blog, I am going back through its posts and linking them better to the topic now at hand: advice for doing RFP responses (the better to promote my book on said topic) rather than the publishing journey. Where posts cannot be re-purposed, out they go. But there’s one that I can neither re-purpose, nor quite bring myself to let go. So – here’s a mid-week blast from my past: 03 September 2013.
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Flash of yellow breast
Stymies the novice birder:
Mystery bird flits.
What was that bird with the yellow belly outside the Big Guy’s study yesterday?
Fall storms delay play
As final round disappoints;
Watched balls will not fall.
Will Graham De Laet be happy with his third-place finish this week?
And why is haiku so much harder than it looks?
Any of these could be the ponderables going through my mind as I lie awake, very early the morning after Labour Day, but they are not. Instead, I am thinking about all the questions I have about the next step with my publisher, with whom I expect to be in contact again this coming week.
Aren’t we going to need a contract soon? What should be in it? Which are their responsibilities and which are mine? How the heck do we set a price? What’s reasonable for the revenue split? Should I explore the fee-for-service option instead of sharing the risk and the reward? Should I get a second opinion? Can I stand to start this process over again with someone else?
Now I regret having had my head down, writing, for the last two years, when I should have been using some of that time to get smart about publishing. Too soon old, too late smart: I believe my grandmother had a sign to that effect in her tiny foyer.
But one thing’s for sure: I may be a morning person, but not a one-in-the-morning person. Whatever has to be done, whatever has to be decided, even whatever has to be (shudder) negotiated, it will all look better when the sun is up.
After all, if the answers to the unpondered questions are straightforward enough–
Probably a warbler of some sort.
He likely wishes he’d won.
I don’t have a lyrical bone in my body.
— the answers to the other questions will all come clear in the fullness of time, too. But I do wonder what my grandmother pondered when she couldn’t sleep.
Sometimes I lie awake, fussing about the future. But more often the sleepless nights result from having taken criticism (or opposition, or hate mail, whatever) too personally (for which, of course, see today’s blog on that subject). I can spend hours in the dark, mentally writing and rewriting and revising and editing and tightening — and scrapping — rejoinders that will put the other person in his place, or justify my position, or… or… Sleep comes only when I can finally reach a conclusion about what I should do, which may, sometimes, be nothing.
Jim
Jim T – For me, I’m not sure the fussing causes the sleeplessness, but there’s something devilishly seductive about fussing once I am awake. Not smart, but there it is – amazingly tough to turn off.