Life is a blur...

It's crunch time in the book publishing world. The big fall titles are all shipped, or about to ship and we are hard at work finishing the last details on the production end of the Spring 2006 list. The Spring catalog is due at the printer in mere days, the Frankfurt Book Fair (the single largest meeting of publishers from around the globe) beckons in just a few short days. We are busily solidifying the Fall 2006 list and about to begin the work on those titles in just days. Spring 2006 will be sold to the "big guys" (read Barnes & Noble et al...) in the next month and the field reps who handle all those smaller but oh so important independent accounts, will be assembling to see the Spring list for the first time in Dec. By then, Spring (in fact 2006) will already be basically over for those of us higher up the food chain......I have a hard time sometimes remembering what year it is. At any given time I can be checking on some title that is about to ship - a book I haven't really looked at in the last 9 months, in the same breath I am trying to wrestle a manuscript for Spring 2007 to the ground, and dealing with a slowwwww illustrator of a book on the slate for Fall 2006.....
Some people have a hard time keeping track of what the date is, or the day, me - in my world - it's all you can do to keep your hands firmly wrapped on what year it is.
I can't help feeling sometimes like the world is spinning ever faster out of control! Time off becomes a vapor dream, a shimmering phantom always just on the edge of the approaching horizon that I never quite reach. No time no time no time.....hurry hurry hurry, that's the drumbeat to which my life seems to march. Hmmmmm......no time even to ponder I'm afraid. To quote someone near and dear - "I'm running out of time."