Here a book, there a book, everywhere a book book ...

Let's see now ...

The deadline for submissions to Hoovering the Roof, the anthology of work produced by members of the East Dulwich Writers' Group, is this Sunday.
16 people have contributed short stories, poems and novel extracts, which have all been through a collective editing process.

Now we need to do everything else necessary to gather them together into a book ready for publishing.

Then there's the project I suggested to the parent/teacher literacy steering group at the boys' school.

'Let's produce a book to tie in with the 50th anniversary,' I suggested a few months ago.

'Great idea,' came the reply last week. 'Let's do it. We can produce a time line covering the last 5 decades, with sections dealing with what was happening at the school at each stage, slots for major national and international events, blasts of popular culture as well as reminiscences and anecdotes from former staff and pupils. It should be visually exciting and will be a celebration of how far we have come.'

'Fantastic! So what's the time scale?'

'Um - we need to launch it at the celebratory event ... at the end of October ...'

Then there's the new development for my freelance editing.
I've always liked to stay in contact with authors whose books I've critiqued, but it's sometimes hard to know when my part of the job is over.
The logical next step has been mentoring and (oh, lucky me) the first person to take up this offer has been the Queen.

She's been blogging in some detail about the process and I'm delighted it seems to be working so well for her. It's certainly a labour of love for me and it's wonderful to be a part of her journey to create a book that I'm convinced is going to be utterly fab!

Oh, yes. And then there's my book. Over halfway and I THINK it's going ok.

Thing is, it doesn't matter how many other books you edit and critique, doing it for yourself is another thing entirely.
Editors need editors too.