Multi-tasking: A Love Story

November 25, 2008

Do you read Paper Cuts– the writing/book blog in The New York Times? This week features a posting about the ‘Nobel commisions mortal sins of omission’ by not awarding writers like Joyce, Proust, and Nabokov a Novel prize in their career.

Every couple of weeks Paper Cuts runs this regular posting called “Stray Questions for…” where they ask a writer a series of the same questions. On Nov. 21 they asked Tom Bissell, author of a travel book, “Chasing the Sea”; a story collection, “God Lives in St. Petersburg”; and a memoir, “The Father of All Things”

the question they ask every writer:

What are you working on?

Here is his response:

As it happens, a lot. In the last few days I’ve cut 2,000 words from a short story whose protagonist — a Bush administration lawyer — gets into trouble abroad; begun work on another chapter in a travel book about apostolic tombs, this one covering Trier, Germany, and Matthias, the apostle who replaced Judas; and written a dozen or so pages of notes for an eventual GQ essay about video games. What this means in terms of research is going from Philippe Sands’s “Torture Team” in the morning to a lunchtime engagement with “The Apocryphal New Testament” to a midnight round of the game “Far Cry 2.” It occurred to me a few weeks ago that I might be going crazy. (read the rest here).

So he’s currently working on a short story, a travel book, and an essay for GQ magazine. All at the same time.

Ooof.

Here’s a picture of Superman, er, Bissell (courtesy of NY Times online).

Here’s a cuter picture of him from a few years ago (bromance is IN right now, by the way):

Is anyone else out there multi-tasking like this? If so, what are you working on and how do you do it? (you can be vague– no worries, I know sometimes it’s difficult to ‘reveal’ a project specifically when it’s in its infancy or other stages; and it doesn’t have to involve writing).