Organised Chaos, Roughly Alphabetised

I want to open with a bold claim: I am kind of, sort of, organised. I’ll give you a moment to sit with that. I know. I had to sit with it too, and I still don’t fully trust it, the way you don’t fully trust a ladder even after you’ve tested the bottom rung.

Here is the evidence, presented in the order it occurred to me, which is to say no order at all.

We have business cards now. For the nook. Actual little rectangles of card with actual words on them, which I keep pulling out of my bag just to look at, the way you’d check on a sourdough starter. The nook itself exists — properly exists, not just as a plan taped to the fridge — and I am currently elbow-deep in inventorying the stock, which mostly involves me picking up a book, having a small feeling about it, and putting it down again in a different pile than the one I meant to put it in. Jo, meanwhile, is off making the bookish ephemera we’re going to sell alongside it, which is the kind of sentence I would have found deeply improbable a year ago and now just say out loud in the supermarket without blinking.

On the writing side of the ledger: the first eight books in the PHL universe are edited within an inch of their lives. I mean that literally — I think if I looked at Rookie Bloom one more time it would flinch. Now, ‘edited’ is doing some quiet lifting in that sentence — it means edited by me, by my sister, and by an editing program, three separate lines of defence, and still not yet handed over to the cousin, who reads a manuscript the way border security reads a suspicious suitcase. So there is still a very real chance those eight books come back from her with a million more changes, because nothing is truly finished until it’s survived being read through the eyes of a grammar nazi. Said with love. Enormous, terrified love. The artwork for all eight is done, which still feels like a magic trick every single time, because I am someone who once spent forty minutes deciding on a font and I have somehow produced eight finished covers without personally combusting. All the marketing artwork is done too, just sitting there patiently, waiting on delivery like a very well-behaved parcel.

What’s left in that pile is tax. Glorious, glamorous tax, going through every purchase from this whole endeavour and turning it into numbers a human accountant will one day squint at. I have not started this. I am telling you I have not started this the way you tell a doctor you’ve been meaning to get that thing looked at.

So: business, organised chaos. Genuinely. I’ll stand behind that description in a court of law.

Life outside the business and the authordom, however, remains a crime scene. Not a metaphorical one. An actual, if-you-opened-that-cupboard-you-would-need-a-lie-down one. I am aware of this. I am, very slowly, doing something about it, in the same spirit that you eat a large meal one bite at a time — mostly by ignoring the size of the plate.

The one bright, fully-assembled corner of that disaster zone is Canada. We now have all the clothes and ephemera we need for the trip, thermals included, which feels like an enormous adult achievement given that packing for cold weather usually defeats me entirely. It’s 71 days away now, which is either a very long time or no time at all, depending entirely on which pile of tax receipts I’m looking at when you ask me.

More soon — probably in a slightly different kind of chaos by then, knowing my luck.