…just had a lot on my plate last week. The usual cartoon deadlines, of course, which always take precedence. But I also had a speaking gig at Haverford College, near Philadelphia, last week, and while I’ve been giving public talks for well over a decade, this was the first time I gave my New! Improved! completely digital presentation a test run, and I had to spend the day before going through the files and making various panicked last-minute adjustments and revisions. Happily, the preparation paid off and everything worked as I hoped it would, and the talk was both well-attended and well-received. Even made it there and back before the snow — if the talk had been scheduled for the next day, it would have most likely been cancelled. (Note to student events coordinators — I only do a few of these things each semester, and fall 2003 is filling up, so if you have any interest in bringing the Tom Tomorrow dog-and-pony show to your campus, please contact me soon.)
When I got back from Haverford, I found that I had yet another last-minute book crisis to contend with — several minor but annoying mistakes which needed Immediate Attention. Feels like I’ve been working on this book forever — instead of doing another two-year collection, my publisher wanted to put out a larger treasury-style thing, so we’re talking about a 240 page monster spanning the past decade and a half, with a 32 page color section in the middle. I was hoping it would be in bookstores by spring, but depending on circumstances entirely out of my control, it may not be out until the summer.
On top of all of this, the electricity in my building started glitching out on Friday — some sort of unfortunate reaction to the weather — and you can imagine my delight at discovering that my old battery-backup power surge protector had at some point decided to retire from the power surge protection business, without, of course, bothering to inform me of the fact. (Indicator lights worked fine, surge protection did not.) Had to trudge down to the office supply store and buy a new one and lug it home and set it up — and then I discovered that the power glitches had fried my cable modem, and I spent several hours on the phone with tech support, until I finally (insert sound of hand slapping forehead here) realized that the modem wasn’t the problem, it was my ethernet router…blah blah blah.
So. It’s Monday morning, a new week full of hope and promise, and everything’s running smoothly at the moment. But I have to stare down the imminent deadlines, and get ahead on some work to cover myself through the onrushing holidays…so things might stay sporadic around here for awhile longer, I’m not really sure. In the meantime, I’ve been adding a few sites to the often-neglected link list, and I’m sure that in the aggregate, most of your blogging needs will be adequately fulfilled there.