...& then disaster struck
Of course. I mean, conference week couldn't go off without a single hitch, right? (This is my life we're talking about, so the answer is a resounding No. :-P)Everything was going pretty well. My agent had finally flown in, so we did breakfast & even sat together for the Awards Ceremony Saturday night. Then we were at the post-Awards party where all the winners get together to celebrate over alcohol & chocolate. *g* We sat & chatted with Audrey LaFehr (an editor at Kensington) for a while, then some of my friends came over & we talked some more.
I forget why, exactly, but the topic turned to the HOTTER THAN HELL anthology I'll be doing with Kim Harrison & several other big-name authors for HarperCollins. Now, the last I heard, I was simply approved for being involved. (Yippee!) But I hadn't heard a single thing since. And I wasn't worried, because I'd been warned that it was a slow process & was just in the planning stages when I got the news.
But then I'm sitting there, minding my own business, thinking all is right with the world, when my agent says something about the stories being due September 15th.
Huh? Excuse me? I swear, I think I did one of those squeegee things with my ear to make sure I'd heard him correctly. The stories are due when? Of this year?!?
I probably wouldn't have been so stunned--or panic-stricken--if it weren't for the two deadlines I'm currently under. They're a bit tighter than I'm used to, & having to take a week away for the conference didn't help matters. So the idea of throwing another deadline into the mix made me want to curl into a fetal position & wish for death. :-p I did bury my face in the tablecloth & whimper a little.
But my agent, ever coming to my rescue, started jotting notes on a napkin & made me promise not to lose sleep over it until he'd gotten back to the office & made some phone calls. And I did promise, because there was absolutely nothing I could do about it until I got home, anyway. I immediately decided to crawl deep into my cave of denial & not come out until Monday night, when he would hopefully have an update for me.
Even though I'd promised not to worry & did a pretty good job of blocking out the possible crisis, I admit I did think about it occasionally. I even started to come to terms with the fact that I might have to squeeze three stories into the time it usually takes me to write one. Thank goodness two would be fairly short. The HOTTER THAN HELL novella only has to be about 5,000 words, so I could probably, conceivably fit it in between everything else.
In case I haven't mentioned it recently, though, I have a fabulous agent, & he was right when he told me not to panic. There was a message waiting for me the minute I walked in the house Monday evening. He'd talked to The Powers That Be, & though they're still not sure why I didn't get the information before, we discovered two things. Number one, the September 15th deadline has proved problematic for a few of the other (much bigger name) authors, too, so they'll most likely be moving it back to the end of the year. (Whew, such a relief, even though the story is a short one.) Number two, they thought my story was already finished & turned in.
See, before I was even invited to participate in this collection, I worked up a novella proposal to show them what I could do. HOTTER THAN HELL is going to be a very sexy paranormal anthology, & since I've only done some westerns & Desires, I knew my name wouldn't be the first to pop into people's heads for that type of story. Well, here everyone thought the proposal I turned in was my finished story. LOL So technically, I not only met my deadline, but had my work done before everyone else & before I even got the offer to participate. ROTFLMAO.
However, I never really thought of that proposal as my finished story, so I would like to tweak it a bit & make sure it reads the way I really want it to. That's why I'm still hoping for the deadline extension. I might not technically need it at this point, but I'd feel better if I had it.
So...disaster diverted, thanks to a great agent & a bit of advance preparation on my part, & the conference technically ended on a positive note, after all. :-)
Currently reading Countdown by Iris Johansen
Currently watching The Pacifier
