Faffing, features, phone calls...

Despite the enormous amount of pressure I am under to hit a lot of deadlines in a very short space of time, I am doing very well at skiving and procrastinating. Fact is, I perform best when the deadline is imminent. So even though the nightmare handbook I agreed to edit has a deadline just 10 days away, needless to say I have barely started it. This being the same handbook I moaned about on Tuesday...

I have written most of one of my features for a women's mag. I had 30 minutes of interview on my new toy, which is proving to have been a sound investment (pardon the pun), plus a bunch of notes. I wrote up 2/3rds from the notes, doing the quotes from recall, and was relieved that I had nailed them pretty accurately when I played the interview back. While my epilepsy causes me vocabulary problems occasionally, which is very distressing when you work with words for a living, fortunately it has not damaged my memory function too much. But I digress - I'll finish up the interview tomorrow and mail it to the ed, so it will be filed well before deadline. Leaving me just the other feature plus the handbook that I really do not want to edit.

Too late, I have committed to this project, more fool me. But I swear this will be last one I do for this particular publisher. The rate they offer is ridiculously low for the amount of effort they expect. Not even if it means starving in a garret would I do another book for them. Not that I'll starve when my beloved P takes such good care of me, but you get the idea.

I had a hilarious phone conference this morning with a company that I ranted about in a newspaper column last week. The PR person has been falling over himself to butter me up after I gave such bad press, so I agreed to participate in the call so they could solve my problems. It was utterly pointless. Their techy geek talked to me as if I were 3 years old and explained that I needed to reset various settings on my PC to resolve the issues I'd experienced. He wasn't telling me anything new - what he suggested was precisely what I had complained about having to do in the original article! Never mind. I guess he meant well. And I have been offered vast amounts of free kit to make up for my poor experience. One of the perks of hacking...