Deadlines

Deadlines are tough. Deadlines are inevitable. They loom there, in the distance, and grow closer and closer as the days tick by.

Most authors and illustrators I know don't write/illustrate full time, and even the ones that do have other things on their plate, like, I don't know...family? Friends? PTA? Church? Dr. Who? Whatever it is, these other aspects of life are important, and are often higher priority. So how do authors do it?

Honestly, I don't know. I'm in constant awe of my clients who turn manuscripts in to me or their editor on time (or mostly on time) despite having a baby (or two), teaching full-time, coaching their kid's baseball team while working full-time, running a household, getting married, driving across the country, being terribly sick, etc. (All of these things and more have happened--my clients are freaking SUPERHEROES).

Other people working with writers are on deadlines, too. Editors, publicists, art departments, etc...all have deadlines. Deadlines that are directly related to writer deadlines. It's like this amazing house of cards that just keeps building and building...though, these are pretty sturdy cards. If one slips, it doesn't mean they all come crumbling down. Maybe one or two fall with it. Or if it's really bad, maybe a whole level. But your publisher has such a strong foundation, that most of the cards stay in place. (So don't worry!)

Agents have deadlines, too.

And speaking of deadlines, this has been my life the past 2 weeks:

6:00, Wake up (sometimes 5am, depending how backlogged I am on edits)

Mmmm. Cofffeeeeeeeee.

Sit down to read manuscripts/take notes/work on line edits.

*make sure iphone is charging!

7:15ish, PeeWee wakes up and finds me if Joe hasn't found him first

-Let PeeWee out

-Administer PeeWee's medicine (poor old guy....)

-Give PeeWee treat and a snuggle

-Back to work

8 - 8:40, shower, brush, do hair, pack bag, get dressed, run out to the car, realize I forgot my charging iphone, run back in for it, rush to the train station

8:44, park blocks away and curse myself for not just walking from home, run to the train with Joe carrying my third cup of coffee in a to-go cup (he's the best), barely catch the 8:48 as the doors shut on my heels

8:49, settle into a seat, take out my laptop and/or iphone and either continue editing and/or start answering emails while Joe reads a book/the paper

9:35, arrive in Penn Station, kiss Joe goodbye, join the ranks of commuters walking to work

9:50, arrive in awesome new office (post to come about said new office!)

10:00 - 12:00, emails (lots!), phone conferences, paperwork (lots), checking in with Nancy/Kathleen/Suzie

noon - 2:30, lunch meeting w/an editor or other industry professional (yes, these are most days), or eat at my desk while reading.

2:30 - 6, more emails (lots and LOTS of emails), phone conferences (usually 2 or 3 of them), sometimes an afternoon meeting, more paperwork, in-office status updates (and perhaps a discussion of a new project from one of us)

This is where the day changes. About half the time it goes like this:

6:30 - meet an industry person (editor, agent, book scout, etc) for drinks, or go to an industry event since there are many this time of year

9:08 or 9:52, catch one of these trains home (eat a hot dog in Penn Station for dinner...sorry, Mom)

10:00 or 10:30, Joe picks me up at the train station, PeeWee on his lap--go home, wind down and watch TV with my boys for about an hour.

12:00, catch up on email (still lots), read and edit until I fall asleep.

The other half of the time it goes like this:

6:13 or 6:39, meet Joe at Penn station to catch the train home

7-9:00, get home, take care of PeeWee, eat dinner, wind down and watch TV with my boys for about an hour, an occasional client/film call during this time.

9:00 - midnightish, catch up on emails, read and edit

There have been a few almost all-nighters in there these past weeks, too. After all, it's deadline time! (Heck, look at the timestamp on this post...I've been up since three!).

But guess what? I get to read things like the second installment in both the Something Strange & Deadly series, and the Ever Afters series. And the second book in The Shadow Reader series, too! I get to work on Kody Keplinger's latest project, and read through the final revisions on Insurgent. I get to drool over the ending of Erica O'rourke's trilogy, and laugh at the twisted humor in Allan Woodrow's latest, and feel a chill down my spine from one of my newest projects by Gemma Cooper. I get to be transported back to the Progressive Era, or 200 years into the future. And I even get to play around with illustrations and text by author-illustrators like this one and this one.

When I get to do all of that, isn't all the hectic running around worth it?

Hells yeah it is!

And what especially keeps me going, is knowing that all of my clients are running around the same way (well...not the same way, but they've got other jobs and other lives outside of writing, too!). And they never complain.

We're all in it because we love books.

That's a rush that's even better than coffee.

Good luck on your pre-holiday deadlines, everyone!

Things that make me happy.....

Cookies AND some of my favorite book characters.....

The lovely Susan Prunty made these cookie versions of Zachary Ruthless and his henchmen Newt.  How cool are they??  Read more about her fiction-to-cookie-making adventures on her blog here. 

My Rotten Book Signing (Guest Post: Allan Woodrow)

What if you throw a party and no one comes? I think everyone has that fear, whether you’re throwing a keg party in the backyard or doing a book signing. I kept imagining reading from my book, The Rotten Adventures of Zachary Ruthless, with two or three employees of Barnes and Noble watching to be polite. One of them claps to make me feel better. The sound echoes through the empty store. In the back, the person behind the coffee counter burps. I buy a couple of books just to sell something, because I feel guilty. The store manager shakes her head out of pity.

So when B&N said they bought a couple of hundred books for my signing, I felt even more pressure. What were they thinking? Were they going to make me buy 195 of them myself?

So, it was a bit of relief to see about 40 kids sitting around my chair waiting for me to read my first chapter during my launch last week. The manager handed me a microphone, and I was off. It’s a big store, but I guess you could hear my voice throughout (the microphone was pretty loud). I’m glad I didn’t know that until later.

Kids, of course are a great audience. They gave me their best evil laughs, and a boy named Jacob did a great hiccupping hyena-laugh for us (you’ll have to read the book to know how that fits into the story). And I don’t think I mispronounced any words. I tend to be a serial mispronouncer, so this was a big accomplishment even though I practiced reading the chapter 46 times at home.

Then I sat behind a desk with a  big bowl of gummy tarantulas, gummy internal organs, gummy blood, and gumball eyeballs … all perfectly evil in keeping with the evilness of my book. Barnes & Noble assigned numbers to people wanting me to sign, so they announced over the loudspeakers, “People with numbers 15-30, please get in line for Allan Woodrow’s autograph,” etc. Pretty surreal, actually. It took about 80 minutes to get through everyone’s books.

Then I was home, no longer a big time author person but someone who had to clean the fish tank. The goldfish don’t care I have a book, apparently. But neither will anyone else unless I write another one just as good.

Signing is over. Time to go back to work. 

The Hiatus

Hello All!

So we've been kinda busy.  Like busy busy.  And busy is always good.

Most of our time has been filled with things like revisions (ongoing), projects on submission, books being sold, contracts being negotiated, film deals being closed, foreign deals being translated (ha--not exactly), queries/manuscripts being read, meetings being met (teehee, okay now I'm just getting silly) and all that good stuff.

And there is more good stuff to come.  But in the mean time, we need to take a short blogging hiatus.  While we're gone, there are a number of fun blogs to read in the mean time.

Such as....

Confessions of Suite 500, agent Suzie Townsend's blog and where I occasionally guest blog.

La Vie en Prose, a blog run by Janet Reid's assistant Meredith Barnes.

Query Shark, need I say more?

Neverending Page Turner, run by Kathleen Ortiz and her digital media genius!

And of course, if you don't already read Janet Reid's blog, Kristin Nelson's blog, or Rachelle Gardner's blog you should.

As for us, we'll be back and running again by May 1, starting with a blog post about a truly evil and villainous boy named Zachary Ruthless. If you'd like to get a head start, you can pre-order Zachary's first book, The Rotten Adventures of Zachary Ruthless through Amazon, IndieBound, or Barnes & Noble.

And if you're interested in the status of our submissions, check the Query Log at the top of the blog, which we will be updating regularly.

See you guys, soon!

PS - if you get bored, you can practice your evil laugh.  Check it out.

NCL news to share!

First off, have you checked out Allan Woodrow's villainous blog yet? He's the author of the upcoming series The Rotten Adventures of Zachary Ruthless (HarperChildren's, Summer 2011) and in his latest post, him and the series illustrator--the utterly evil Aaron Blecha--are plotting some serious schemes.

In other news...Erica O'Rourke won the Golden Heart this weekend at RWA in the YA category--yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaayyyyy!!!! We are STOKED like woah about this. Erica has written a fantastic urban fantasy series for teens and it is dark and hot and all things of awesomeness in between, let me tell you. But we can't tell you anything more about it...yet. Stay tuned for future announcement on this new series!

Read Erica's blog post about it and how she got hugged by a certain MAJORLY FAMOUS AUTHOR ::swoon::

And for those of you writers who HAVEN'T entered in Sara's contest from yesterday, what are you waiting for??