I am in the middle of a sea of uncertainty regarding work. Yes, there is lots of work to do! When can we get it to you? Well, not now. Later. Soon. That stuff that was also due in March? Not ready. Soon. Later.

As happens with large team projects, slowdowns here and there or periods of rewriting aggregate, and that aggregation now means the initial projected schedule provided to me is completely inapplicable by this point. So I know I have an unclear amount of work to edit… sometime this summer. When? Well… July? The first bits, anyway? (On the initial schedule, this part of the project was to be wrapping up in July.)

So I’m trying not to panic, both helped and hindered by Ceri saying, “You’re doing MENUS? Oh my gods, those are HUGE!” because now I at least have an idea of how much work there will be (i.e. a lot), but also now I am anxious about how soon they want this stuff turned around when it eventually gets here. The projected schedule estimated 10 days would be required to handle the material, which is somewhat comforting; that’s two weeks of work. There’s always more of a crush as the end of the project approaches, and the same amount of work has to get crammed into a smaller time period, though. I am good, and I am outrageously fast (did I not just turn around a 400+ page batch in a crazy-brief four or five days? yes, I did, holy cats, and let me tell you, there was wine when I was done), but not knowing is freaking me out. Especially since I have a week out of town coming up when I can’t work, which is likely to coincide with the first batch of this material finally reaching me.

Apart from the ZOMG I DON’T KNOW WHAT IS GOING TO HAPPEN WITH MY SCHEDULE, which is something that always triggers anxiety (and I haven’t yet mentioned that daycare is closed for the last two weeks of July, ha ha ha, this will be fun), I am still very much enjoying this project. It’s been fun to see the fan reaction to the trailers and launch material, and to know secret stuff, and to think about how much fun people will have discovering it all when the game is released. Turns out the Xbox version will only be available on XBox One, though, not the 360, which means it’s time for HRH and I to update our Xbox console. The recent announcement that the One will now extend backward compatibility to lots of 360 games is a relief, though.

On the other work hand (does that make sense? sure, why not, yay freelancing), I currently have a deliciously perfect and staggeringly good novel I’m working on for the publisher. It’s so good that I’m doing the equivalent of racing through pages just to see what happens next. It’s beautifully clean, so I have next to nothing to do other than add the occasional comma, remove the occasional italicized closing quotation mark, and make my list of proper nouns to check. It’s a luxury to work on it, and I feel extremely fortunate to have been the one assigned to it. It’s half contemporary, half historical, and has magical realism; it’s a book I will recommend wholeheartedly and without reservation to pretty much everyone when it’s released.