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Galleys are next-to-last copies of a book manuscript and mine arrived with a vengeance less than two weeks ago. The due date for them to be *back* at the publisher is tomorrow but alas, that won’t happen as I am 1. running behind and 2. they must have included 200 corrections in there. When I saw them all, I wanted to just hide. Anyway, the galleys are taking forever to work on because the publisher wanted the bibliography done a whole different way than I had understood it was to be done. Not only that, but to look up the missing info is tedious work and impossible to do during Veeka’s waking hours.
Usually I would take a day off to work on such things but with the pope arriving April 15 and enormous amounts to be done for a large papal section we are assembling, there is no way I can take time off. In fact, the deadline for mountains of copy was
Friday, which I would have made had not two daily stories in a row delayed me Thursday and Friday. The latter concerned one of the biggest church legal battles in the country, happening right here in northern Virginia and which I am monitoring closely. Turns out the circuit judge in charge of a lawsuit pitting the Episcopal Church and Diocese of Virginia against 11 breakaway churches decided to release his 83-page opinion about 10 p.m. Thursday.
I got the call from one of the lawyers at 12:09 a.m. Fortunately I was up (working on the galleys, of course), so….I quickly wrote 5-7 paragraphs and they went up on the Washington Times web site by 1 a.m., beating all the other media by many, many hours. But …was I tired on Friday. By the time I got in, various articles for the section had to be edited, some extensively plus I had to do a second-day rewrite of the Episcopal piece for Saturday’s paper.
Oh, and the phones at the Washington Times office weren’t working all day. Plus people kept on dropping by, asking me pope questions, as I. And the headline on the internet piece was inaccurate, so I had one Episcopal official continually emailing me, demanding it be changed (reporters do not control what is in the headlines). Finally, I threw in the towel, deciding my big take-out on the pope will have to be written Monday.
Then it was off to Dulles airport to pick up a friend coming for the weekend. We went out to eat sushi, so the photo here is of Veeka chowing down. No real estate agent called Friday night to say she was dropping by with a customer, so I left early Saturday morning to be on a journalists’ panel out by Dulles while my friend Julie babysat Veeka. But of course we left the house a mess and wouldn’t you know it, an agent walked in with some clients right when we were both gone and there piles of disgusting things everywhere. Sigh.
Which is why I went for a massage today to relieve all the tension that’s been knotting me up.
