My assistant Connie and I had just opened up a brand-new box full of copies of Grace's upcoming book, Where the Mountain Meets the Moon (pub date: June 2009). It was absolutely beautiful, and the gold ink on the cover was really striking...but then I noticed that the book had somehow been printed with the wrong title!!! Printed on the cover in brilliant, beautiful gold ink was one of the other titles Grace had tossed around when we were brainstorming different title ideas.
Before Grace completely panics, I have to say that this was all in a dream I had Friday night.
So, in my dream, it took me a while to realize what had happened. I freaked out and said to Connie in a panicked voice, "It has the wrong title!!!!" I had no idea how this could have happened. The ARCs had all been printed with the right title, we had all reviewed the proofs and the title had been right then. I frantically checked the interior, and the title was okay there, so it was just the jacket. That was a small relief. We started running around the office find the appropriate people to notify, and eventually determined that we'd have to print the jackets over...
And that's when I woke up. What a relief.
I'm not surprised I had this dream. Last week was a stressful work week (unrelated to Grace's book), we've had some printing problems with finished books lately (one book had been printed without the last 16 pages, another had the author's byline mysteriously gone from the front cover--in both cases, it was deemed to be the printer's error, and the books were reprinted at no cost to us--whew!) and I also found out that Where the Mountain Meets the Moon is printing on Tuesday (yay!). So, everything combined, it's somewhat natural that everything going on resulted in the nightmare. But man, I'm going to be nervous the first time I see a finished copy of the book! But the designer, the brilliant Alison Impey, will be going on press to make sure that the colors are just right--and I'm sure she'd notice if the title was wrong. Grace, don't worry, we'll get it right!
What types of anxiety work dreams do you all have? I have then all the time, sometimes funny, sometimes scary.
11 comments:
I haven't had a work anxiety dream in a while, but my standard stress dream is about my teeth falling out. Whenever I have that dream, I know I need to build in some relaxing time.
(Please make sure I'm on the list for Grace's book. I don't request many books from the publishers, but I am really looking forward to hers.)
I had a bad dream about work the other day: I sent out a letter without proofing it - okay, that doesn't sound so bad - but I work in a law office. :(
Good thing I was planning a weekend getaway- time to relax.
A book printed without the last 16 pages? Sounds scary but it's a good thing you noticed!
eeks!! so glad it was just a dream...
So glad it was a dream - AND NOT MY FAULT!
;-)
I was traveling in NY last week and weas pretty stressed because I had little time to work on my current book project. Last time I was in NY was for an SCBWI conference, and I think that's why my anxiety dream was that I was arriving at the conference when I realized that *I* was the keynote speaker and had totally failed to write a speech. So I ran into a side room and was frantically writing, and was just getting something together when I realized -- oh no -- I would need images for the power point, too! And all I had with me were photos of my baby.
I actually had this dream TWICE in the same night. Total Panic.
sooo - as a former member of the LB production dept., will you tell me which printer screwed up so badly? :)
But Abigail, I totally used pictures of my babies in my last SCBWI PPT presentation. Was it all a dream?
I have dreams of this often, as my publisher seems to go from cheaper overseas printer to even cheaper.
(last book was dark tints of orange on every page)
Other then colour/print nightmares I often wake up "drawing". Literally my hand is in the air making ovals. I can't imagine a civil servant having dreams like this, sitting at his/her desk shuffeling papers:)
I can totally relate to that dream: would anyone besides an editor ever have it? Maybe the production manager? There's just so many things that can go wrong with in the process---files going missing, art going missing, fonts not loading correctly, text dropping out, pages dropping out. Not to mention all the little niggling grammatical catastrophes---misspellings, capitalizations, errant commas. Phew! Ours is a VERY stressful job. The worst thing that ever happened to me was when the Fed-Ex guy left final artwork outside the side door of our returns warehouse. We were looking for it frantically for four hours and I kept imagining having to call up the illustrator and telling him we'd lost four months of his work.
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