So I might as well start this off with a confession. It’s three in the morning. I’m running on no sleep, one slice of cheesy garlic bread and a total sense of literary autopilot. Apologies if reading this month’s column feels like… well… reading the rest of Hullfire. Chortle chortle. Turns out our glorious editor, earlier this week, dialled what he thought was my number to arrange a deadline and ended up sorting out the fine details with a complete random. To this anonymous chap’s credit, whoever he is, he was apparently well up for it and I look forward to reading whatever he came up with.
Anyhow, my rather hurried brief got me thinking. Deadlines are strange things. By the time you’re reading this, you’ll most likely have managed to either meet or find some way of creatively ignoring at least some of yours. They loom in the mind like that phone call to your mum that you really should make… like now. Go on, call your mum. I’ll wait. She just wants to hear from you, you heartless excuse for a human being!
All done? Good times. Now where was I? Oh yes, deadlines. They loom in the mind like, I dunno, something big and loomey, yet they’re completely negotiable. I wonder what the strangest excuse for an extension the various departments have ever heard? Sorry, I need another week for my dissertation, the dog ate my laptop. Then the dog died. Then I had to get a new dog. Then the new dog ate the old dog’s body, and thus, in a roundabout fashion, the laptop. Then the new dog died and we got a rabbit. Turns out the old dog had the plague, and his death had nothing to do with the laptop.
Hmmm… I wonder if that would actually work.
Rory Stobo
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