Damn I'm Good

I'm coming — at least I hope I'm coming — out the other end of my busy, busy, busy month, which included trips to New Orleans, Portland, and most recently DC.

Contrary to expectations, and perhaps to the laws of physics, I managed to do everything I needed to do. (Except sleep.) Still have to put the finishing touches on the report on the book proposal, and the proposal for the Cambridge volume, but they're nearly there.

Meanwhile, Ashgate Publishing (publishers of my forthcoming Deception and Detection in Eighteenth-Century Britain, for which they've prepared a swell flyer) has asked me to consider being the editor of a new book series. We're still working on the exact rubric — something to do with eighteenth-century British literature — but I've been considering a few possibilities. Such as:

• The Ashgate Series of Books Jack Likes
• Ashgate Books by People Jack Likes
• Ashgate Studies in the Kinds of Things Jack Would Write About If He Had the Time, But He Probably Doesn't.

I'll work out the technicalities later, but I think I'm on the right track. And a book publisher in the vast EBSCO empire has asked me to edit — I think edit is too grand a word, but who am I to argue? — a series of collections of previously published essays on major works and authors. (First up: Stoker's Dracula.)

So it may be busy, busy, busy for the foreseeable future.