Phew! My horrible time/work crunch is now over. I had a really busy schedule planned for this week, and then on Mon. afternoon Deb Chasman at Boston Review sent me a marked-up copy of the big Lebanon-war upsumming piece I wrote for them at the beginning of September: She asked me to review the markups on it as fast as I could and get it back to her by Wednesday. I looked it over and quickly concluded it needed quite a lot more careful work from me– to update it, to refine its internal organization a bit, and to save it from what looked at that point a little like “death from too many different people having had a go at it.”
Meanwhile, this incredibly busy week loomed. Including me being the gracious hostess (!) for a small fundraiser Bill and I were hosting Tuesday evening for our great Congressional candidate, Al Weed; me getting to DC by 10 a.m. Wed. morning for a really interesting-looking discussion at the U.S. Institute of Peace on “How to deal with Hamas and Hizbullah”; various other meetings in DC; various Quaker-related things; etc etc.
So I panicked a bit. Most of all I didn’t want to short-change the rewriting job for the BR piece, which needed a lot of the kind of focus that’s hard to muster when you have a zillion other things on your mind and you’re flitting from hither to yon. Deb finally gave me till this morning to get it done. On Tuesday, Wednesday, and last night, I did what I could. But it still wasn’t finished… Finally, by sitting straight down at my desk at 7:30 this morning I finally finished the rewrite and got it back to Deb by about 10… Then I pulled on my running clothes, walked the dog, ran three miles, and finally got to sit down with a cup of coffee and today’s newspapers.
So now, what better way to spend a relaxed afternoon than by blogging?
Deb says the issue with my piece in it will be a generally excellent one. I’ll trust her on that, but it won’t be out till the end of October. Since I started enjoying the instant gratification of blogging, I’ve often felt frustrated by having to endure something as onerous as a seven-week turnround for an important, timely piece of writing. But I guess it’s worth doing. I do, after all, keep coming across people who say they’ve read one or another of my longer, composed-and-edited articles– mainly the BR ones on the Middle East or Rwanda, but also my Foreign Policy piece from earlier this year, on war-crimes courts in general. So I guess it’s worth taking the trouble to try and make them as good as possible?
(Talking of long-turnround efforts, where the heck is my book on post-atrocity policies, anyway?? The folks at Paradigm Press told me it was due to ship from the printers a couple of weeks ago… But I haven’t seen it yet. Oh well, that just further reminds me how worthwhile it is to keep blogging.)
Watch for a few interesting posts coming up.