"Did you get my e-mail?" he asked. "I need the dialogue overhaul. Stephen Fry will be here in a couple of hours."
"Hang on," I said, puzzled. "That's not happening until Thursday."
"Right," said Dave. "Today. Thursday. Stephen Fry. Couple of hours from now."
I hadn't got his e-mail, although I had a script on my computer, so that was no problem. I did the work and e-mailed it over to Dave at the London studio he's in. Stephen Fry plays the Librarian in MirrorMask. I still couldn't work out what had happened to the various intervening days...
Oh well. Right now, I have an IQ of about four. I'm leaving things that should be in the oven in the fridge, and vice versa. Cups of tea are made and never drunk, or remembered hours later. I answered the door holding the book I'm currently writing in, signed for a fedex package -- some proofs for the Nebula Anthology, in which an American Gods story is being reprinted, -- and then spent fifteen minutes walking around the house looking for the blank book I had been holding, which turned out to be cunningly hidden underneath the empty fedex envelope in the hall.
This normally happens when I'm writing fiction, to some degree or other. I just assume all the little processing units are trying to get Fat Charlie to make his phone call, or they're trying to figure out whether anyone's going to make the mistake of drinking from Clea Strange's barrel of brandy. I hope that's what they're doing. It would be a fat lot of good if they were trying to come up with a plan for world peace and harmony, or solving the riddle of the Marie Celeste, or figuring out ways to record the music of the spheres.