Order to chaos, order to chaos, order to chaos (saying it over and over will make it happen, right?)

First round of August company just departed; second round is due in two weeks and in between I have the Mazama Book Festival soooooo, it's hella crazy around here.

I am so freaking behind!!!!

I need to have a ton of pages on the next book to super agent in September and I need to write a ton of reviews and I need to sort and read and research and GET ALL THIS CRAP DONE.

Seriously.

Here is where I'm at right now:

For Booklist I have four books due by the end of month: A Random Book About the Power of Anyone (youth activism), Secrets of the Ice (the global importance of Antarctica), Apocalyptic Planet (science & adventure around the world that is not as depressing as the title suggests) and Lynn Marguilis: the Life & Legacy of a Scientific Rebel (biography).

For September column: Need to write reviews for The Plant Hunters (19th century botantical explorers), America's Other Audubon (stunning story & art about someone you've never heard of but should have) and Invincible Microbe (the story of tuberculosis). Also need to finish reading & review Science on Ice from the University of Chicago.

For down the line I'm reading Sailor Twain, a gn by Mark Siegel that is quite well done. Not sure where this will fit - sometime this fall/early winter. Also for down the line, The Boolean Gate a novella by Walter Jon Williams with Mark Twain and Nicola Tesla, The Prisoner of Heaven by Carlos Ruiz Zafon, Maverick Jetpants in the City of Quality (I'm leaning toward November for this one but only 1/3 of the way through and the jury is still out) and Mister Death's Blue-Eyed Girls and Wonder Show (which I started months ago but set aside when I realized it would fit in the fall) both for the October column.

Also still need to get that dang review of "The Coldest Girl in Coldtown", a short story by Holly Black, written for my October column. (I will mention the whole collection but really want to go a bit more indepth on this particular story.)

And I have to finish the feature on house-building books I got completely blocked on this month - that will be sent to Bookslut with the September column and I want to do the joint review I posted about the other day on Half in Shade and Trespasses and finding/losing family history but that is not going out until Oct or Nov.

For my wip, there are no books left to read but some different articles to go through as I write including one on aircraft accidents in Merrill Pass and another on naturalism in Hemingway's early fiction (especially the Nick Adams stories). (I swear it makes sense that I'm reading about Hemingway.) (Not that anyone ever needs an excuse to read about Hemingway.) Oh and I just printed out an article from the Sports Illustrated vault on Don Sheldon, one of the greatest mountain pilots of all time. How cool is it that SI has decades of articles online?!

And the University of Iowa just sent me Gathering Noise From My Life: A Camouflaged Memoir by Donald Anderson which looks very interesting but I must resist until everything else has moved a bit off the table. (And while writing all this I just realized I lost Trespasses. It's somewhere in this house but not where I thought it was. What the heck????)

So whew - that's it. Organization is really necessary at this point, yes? Remove piles from my life and all will be good. TOTALLY. (The moral is no travel, no company and no festivals when a book is being written. I promise not to forget this in the future. I SWEAR.)