A Piece of My Mind

How do you usually spend the minutes or the hours that it takes for you to get to and back from work everyday?  When I lived in Jakarta, it used to take me only ten minutes to get to work but ridiculously one to two hours to get home - well, you guys know how impossible the traffic in Sudirman is at 6 in the evening.  One thing that I love so much about moving back to Medan was escaping that horrendous traffic, now it only takes me 20 minutes max to get to and back from work.  I never drive (I can’t drive is actually a more honest way of saying it.  It’s been two years since I bought my own car and still nowhere near turning the ignition), so I use those twenty minutes doing anything I can think of to kill time.  Either listening to the iPod while catching some zzzs (I’m so not a morning person), or playing Pocket Bowling or Pocket Monopoly (one of these days I’m really gonna get a PSP so I can play Gran Turismo whenever I want), or - if I’m really desperate - reading the feasibility analysis pages of the customer that I was supposed to present that day (yeah, I hope my boss is reading this hahahaha).

Anyway, as I got into the car from work yesterday, I found this document lying on the backseat, just arrived from the mail.  Guess what it was: the legal contract between me and the largest publishing house in this country to publish my book!  The book has been going back and forth between me and my editor these last few months - I guess you’re wondering why it took so long, but between my impossible schedule at work, her busy schedule, my septoplasty a.k.a nose surgery and post-op recovery time (will tell you all about it next time, but all I can say now: my doctors and surgeon are genius, totally love the hospital, not so much about the procedures), my projects on corporate culture for my company (that I had to catch up on after missing two weeks of work), him (enough said), this is probably as fast that I could go.  So I spent the whole ride reading through it, after giving it to my friend the legal officer slash lawyer at the office to take a look at it (and I’m so gonna get in trouble because I forgot to mention him in the thank you page!), I finally signed it!

Here’s the good news for me (and I hope for you too if you’re looking forward to this as much as I do): the book will finally go to printing next week, I get to design my own cover (do you think Vera Wang would let anybody else design her own wedding dress?  Yeah, not that I’m Vera Wang for that matter, hahaha), and I hope it will hit the shelves next month.

So the next time you’re going to the bookstore and see this, it’ll be so awesome if you could pick a copy and read and throw me some comments or criticism afterward.  To my closest friends who already hold the copies of the original manuscript of this book, think of it this way: when I’m rich and famous like J.K Rowling, you can always sell that on eBay and make a fortune hahahaha!

Item number 5 on my thirty things to do before I’m thirty: publish a book - check!

Item number 2: be able to drive … not so much.