Calling all mad scientists…

Imagine that life was so literal that someone who was - for example - “hopping mad” would actually be jumping about the office with the same demented and foaming expression as someone with rabies. Got that in your head? Now imagine someone with “writing projects coming out of their ears”. I expect you could probably imagine someone not unlike me, with a beard, rolling eyes, dribbling, muttering incoherently, with maybe rolls of paper stuck out of every orifice and a lap-top shoved right up his…


Well, you get the picture.

To be honest, that’s how I feel at the moment. There are so many projects I’m involved in now that I really do have them squirting out of every orifice, sometimes in the most undignified manner. At the end of Spring I announced I would start writing Smith in-between drafts of The Burning Sands of Time . I thought at that time it would not be so difficult squeezing in a fairly small book (about 200 pages) around the day-job, but that’s optimism for you.
As it stands, the first draft of The Burning Sands of Time is a month overdue, Smith is simply a pile of part-written chapters and notes, and I have two more projects to start!!! Aaaargh!
And what are the other two projects you might ask? Well, one is a web-based anthology I’ve mentioned before, about the Apocalypse – a slow burning series of short stories that covers the end of the world from the viewpoint of characters in good ol’ England – which will be viewed for free from my new website.
And then there’s an untitled TV project I’m going to collaborate on with a good friend of mine, Lee Harris. Lee is a gifted writer (as yet unpublished) with an eye for satire and a quick wit, tempered by an enthusiasm for all things fantastical. He and a friend are currently writing a sketch-show which is both funny and fresh, and harks back to the great comedies like The Fast Show.
But Lee also wishes to write a dark and creepy series for telly that will freak audiences out like no other telly series has done before. In other words something that’s right up my alley (if it weren’t for the lap-top that’s parked uncomfortably there!). For quite some time I’ve had an idea for a dark telly show called “Seven Hills”, so this new project may turn into a merged, slobbering bastard-offspring of Lee’s idea and that.
Which would be cool.
And it would scare the beejeezus out of any TV audience.


All of these projects would be great and I don’t want to marginalize any of them, but where the hell do I find the time for them?
I mean, I have a day-job as well. I have a wife too (who puts up with my creative turns!), not to mention friends and family.
Does anyone have any time-saving ideas that doesn’t include quitting the day-job (oh, I wish!)?
Or perhaps do you know anyone who has a number of clones for sale? They don’t need to look exactly like me, just enough to fool the wife and perhaps my boss*.


*Please note: I will only accept clones who bear at least a passing resemblance to me and are fully grown. And I won’t accept any clones who are in any way linked to The Office.