Deadlines, whisperings and mindless minions

I've got a few things looming over me, so have been directing my attention to them of late. Don't you just hate that?

The Chinese Whisperings - Yang anthologies are in the home stretch, and the dates for various promotional activities are set. I'm gearing up to coordinate my own promo stuff here and on Twitter with the work on the CW website. Part of that will be posting an interview with my counterpart writer in the Yin anthology, Tina Hunter. It should be interesting!

I've been lining up guest bloggers for Landless, something fairly new for me. I'm looking forward to having them, as I know that the topics they've chosen will certainly be thought-provoking.

Paperwork for the Xpress anthology "Inhuman" was sent off this week. The book should be out in a month or so.

A new writing project is gearing up for August and September, one in which I will be taking on a role roughly equivalent to a managing section editor. The writers I'll be working with are all people whose writing I admire and respect; in some ways this is a big relief, and in other ways it really ups the ante for me.

One of the things that is complicating life a bit is some travel next week and a vacation after that. It's certainly going to curtail my on-line life, especially as a good chunk of that is going to be spent unplugged at a cabin in the woods. I'm hoping to overdose on hiking, reading and sleeping, but I expect to get very little writing done. So, I'm trying to write a few blog posts, #FridayFlash stories and other items to get ahead, auto-scheduling them to post on time.

In my absence, my loyal electronic slaves will also be set up to auto-tweet about things that I think my Twitter community might like to know about, links & such. I will do my best to respond to RTs, questions & comments, but I might be slow about it. It's not hard to schedule all of those, but it takes a bit of time to write two weeks worth of tweets in one setting. Even at a rate well below my normal rate of posting (~20 - 30/day), that's ~100 tweets. If it takes 1 minute to write each one, that's close to two hours to do them all. At that point, it becomes work!

Just out of curiosity, do you do this? Work like hell to get everything taken care of before your vacation so you can relax? Or do you just turn off the lights and walk away from it all? Or do you take the fun parts with you and leave the rest behind?

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