Monday morning, make the lists; divide them by church and state, by job: bookselling, bookmaking, bookteaching. Start with the list for bookselling because it is made of tasks that can be completed, instead of ethereal images, snips of song, effluvia, menu items, instead of Mandy’s problem with POV, Ben’s novel outline he sent you though you did not ask for it. Even though the list for the bookstore is made of tasks that can be completed, add so many of them (order 7 Year Pens, order LePens, order pens from the photos you took from that stationery shop in Asheville where the pens were German and beautiful and still cheap enough you bought one) that the list will lap into next week. Find last week’s list that has lapped into this week and copy it over anew.

This week the fall cookbooks will get their table. The distributed frontlist from Penguin Random House will be ordered. This week there will be enough copies of Coleen Hoover in stock, even as you don’t know how high that number could go. Find your copy of Publisher’s Weekly where you see how many copies each book on the New York Times bestseller list has sold; add up her sales across her five novels. Open your calculator, estimate her royalties. Per week, she earns more than your house is worth. Not what you bought it for five years ago when you sold your last novel; what it’s worth now. There’s no way to care about this, and that is a good lesson to learn.

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