This has been a bad week for communication between editors and production people. I've heard of at least three stories of production people making schedules without paying the slightest attention to the order in which the different parts of the project need to be created. For example, to write Teacher pages to go with a Student book, the Student book sort of needs to be written first. And yet somehow every schedule keeps having Teacher pages coming due first.

Middle sis sent an e-mail to a client's schedule-person today explaining that their schedule was, quite frankly, impossible, and providing them with dates that would be more reasonable. She meant (and said) that these were the dates she would be sending the manuscripts to the client's editors for their initial review, but the schedule-person just assumed that she meant "final end-dates" and proceeded to redo the entire schedule by plopping these dates in. Which then gave middle sis even less time to complete the work. As she put it, "Of course, why wouldn't I ask for that???"

Although we can't actually meet these schedules, we have to try our best to meet them until someone comes to their senses and redoes them. But we all get a little distracted trying to do the impossible. In a meeting yesterday an editor was explaining that in two weeks we have to give art specs to Production for pages that can't be written for at least a month. So while we were all mulling that over I tried to make a note on my pad: Art specs = ASAP. But I was still half-listening to the woman's somewhat irate thoughts about the situation, and what I ended up actually writing was Art specs are crazy.

Which was true, but not necessarily the most important thing for me to carry away from the meeting.