My goodness I have a lot on with work. Which is much better than the opposite problem, but life has been a blur since I got back from New York and one so confusing that even jet lag doesn't know how to cope with it.
I got up after midday today, but even though it was Sunday I couldn't relax. I needed to read through the proof read version of my book to ensure that I was happy with it and to look for any further fuck ups in my writing that had been missed by the copy editor (who apparently approaching 40 herself and got quite a lot out of the book). But I also had to try to get to bed early enough that I would get some sleep before my taxi arrived at 3.45am (about the time I had gone to bed last night) to take me to the airport and my flight to Berlin. Because I am spending all of Monday interviewing German people about David Hasselhoff's part in bringing down the Berlin wall. Seriously.
Later the producer realised we could check in on line and so the taxi time was put back to a much less insane 4.45am, but evenso I was going to find it hard to read an entire book (even if I had the advantage of having written it myself) and get to sleep in time to not be totally zombified and knackered in the morning.
It meant that pretty much my entire day was spent sitting on my sofa, reading the manuscript. I wanted to print it up rather than read if from the screen. But it's 487 pages long and my printer is a bit slow and was printing the pages in reverse order, so I ended up reading the book mainly back to front. Not entirely literally - I was going a chapter at a time, rather than reading the last page and then the second last page.
I didn't see too many actual mistakes, though there was some sloppy and repetitive language, but that was easily rectified. Having put the book aside for a few months now it was mainly quite good fun to have another look and it made me laugh in several places because there was stuff in there that I'd forgotten writing. It zinged along pretty well and I was pleased with it. It's exciting to be getting closer to the stage where it becomes an actual book, which given the personal nature of some of the material is a little bit surreal for me. I may have to buy every copy myself and then burn them to stop my family ever reading about the disgraceful things I have done. On the bright side that will make it a best seller.
It took me until 10pm to get through the whole thing and I knew I should try and sleep straight away, but my brain, on a mixture of New York and gig time was having none of it. I got my head down for a little while around midnight, but was fully awake again by one and then pottered around until around 3am, wondering if I should just stay up all night and fearing the effect that this lack of sleep would have on tomorrow's hectic schedule. I maybe managed an hour and a bit more sleep before my alarm went off at 4.20 to the unfamiliar sound of the World Service on Radio 4. I was exhausted. I was guessing that I had quite an unpleasant day of weariness ahead of me.
