Progress report...

Well, to be frank, I'm struggling at the moment in my bid to keep on with my WIP now that the publication of The Birth Machine is hotting up.

These are the things I'm now engaged on:

Alerting people to the launches, one in Manchester and one in London (details in sidebar). This involves designing invites and leaflets and printing them out, inviting people by post and email, making Facebook events etc. Designing posters for the Manchester launch and spending time taking them around.

Spending time visiting bookshops with advance details of the publication.

Alerting interested academics to the imminent publication.

Writing and sending out press releases about the launches, and contacting listings with the info.

Designing postcards for more general publicity about the book and deciding whether to have them professionally printed.

Oh, and meanwhile I'm running my giveaway.

Maybe it doesn't sound as much as it actually is, but for one thing the emailing is taking ages, and for another my creative focus is now badly affected. Yesterday morning, after logging on to Facebook and Twitter to remind people about my giveaway - only a few minute's work, but needless to say I ended up getting involved in other people's tweets and status updates - I sat down to work, ostensibly for three hours, on the new novel. But they weren't productive. All that other stuff was crowding my head and the greatest part of my psychic energy went into suppressing it. And the words just wouldn't flow the way they have been doing and I kept getting stuck: basically, I was just no longer in the psychic space of the novel.

On Sunday night I attended the Jonathan Franzen conversation and reading at the Whitworth Gallery, and meant to post about it yesterday on my Fictionbitch blog. It was out of the question. After lunch I spent a couple of hours on emails before taking invites to the post, calling off at the library with information about the publication, visiting the printer to cost out postcards, and then came back and carried on emailing before supper and after supper started again. I ended up emailing until gone midnight, by which time I was so hyped up I didn't sleep well.

I'm about to log off now and try and write. Wish me luck!