I wrote the forward to a time travel anthology a while ago. And for my sins, they sent me a bunch of bookplates to sign.
These things sat in my PO box for a while because the email from the editors telling me about them got swallowed up by Apple’s latest iOS update—which has turned the Mail app into a bit of a bin fire. Eventually, though, the team tracked me down and said, “Hey, you’ve really got to sign those bookplates.”
So I picked them up… and the stack was enormous. I stared at it for two days, thinking, this is going to take me two days to sign. And I’m kind of on a deadline here.
But today, I came up with a solution. Every time someone rang and interrupted my writing, I grabbed a stack of bookplates and started signing!
And what I realized is, I didn’t have to give up any real writing time at all. It’s the kind of mechanical, unthinking task you can do while your brain is somewhere else. I think it'll still take me about two hours total to get through them all—but thanks to a lot of phone interruptions today, I'm nearly there.