I've definitely been flirting with deadlines for probably as long as I can remember. I suppose most people do this, but most of my career has been in consulting where your work life is juggling a few too many deadlines and primarily responding to the clients that are the most assertive in reminding you that deadlines are approaching...
Academic life wasn't too different though the stakes for missing a deadline are generally a bit lower. You miss out on a conference or for applying for a grant (with a low chance of success). There was a fairly recent deadline that came and went for a virtual transportation conference, and while I would have liked to put in a paper, they wanted the whole paper, not just a strong abstract. And I simply couldn't do it. I will see if I can repackage that same idea/nascent paper and turn it in to TRB, which has a fixed deadline of Aug 1. I think there is a reasonable chance I can make that deadline.
As far as creative writing deadlines, I had a fairly long history of being a day late for Sing-for-Your-Supper, though they usually let it slide. This past week was the same thing, though they did not take my piece. I have to admit, I think it was not really the lateness, but they didn't like this new piece as much as the others. That said, there has been a bit of a changing of the guard and the newer reader has left to be replaced with a reader from several years back. That's going to be a bit of an issue for me. I had maybe 40-50% success rate with this reader, but 95% with the one that just left. Bummer. And while I mostly write the kind of quirky pieces that they like, I was trying more of a traditional piece (in fact it was half of a TV pilot). I think I'll clean it up and try to strengthen it a bit more and send to the other cold reads series which in fact does lend itself to TV pilots and such. So while I was more than a bit frustrated my piece wasn't taken, 3 of the 4 pieces were solid, and it was a pretty entertaining evening overall.
I have more or less given up on book reviewing on this blog. Never say never, as I have three or maybe even four reviews in draft, but I don't really feel compelled to write them out, and I just don't get as much of a thrill of having them on the blog. I think the community of Canadian reviewers has pretty much died out, at least as far as I am concerned, and I definitely am not going to sign up for another go around in July. I have one actual academic book review that is a few weeks late. This is a case where I was going to do a joint review and one of the publishers never got the book to me, despite claiming it went out, and I frankly don't like the one book I do have in hand (it is more of a workbook than a proper academic book), so I'm really struggling to say something productive about it, but I'll wrap that up fairly soon.
Because everything all more or less blends together while sheltering at home, and I don't have anything remotely fun on the horizon (for months and months and months), it's very easy to forget about the deadlines for on-line shows. I actually missed out on seeing a friend's piece for a virtual fringe, and I'm going to have to really push myself to get psyched up for Luminato, which is this weekend. Life is just frankly depressing these days, even with the nicer weather (finally!). It doesn't pay to dwell on it, but I am deeply unhappy now, and it is hard to muster up much enthusiasm for anything, let along spend the energy to meet a (frequently artificial) deadline.
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