A little blot on the carpet
[Yes, I am VERY late, even for me, posting this evening, because I HAVEN'T BEEN ABLE TO GET INTO THE BLOG. The rest of the web was running nicely, thank you, but both blog and web site have been down for me for over an hour, both with IE and Mozilla. ARRRRRRRRGH.]
. . . So I hurtled hellhounds, wrote a few more pages of the second draft of PEGASUS, went to my piano lesson*, rehurtled hellhounds**, had actual food for tea because I was going to bell practise tonight . . . and what a good thing I had thus fortified myself because I’d completely forgotten that it was the annual tower meeting tonight after the rope-pulling part and remembering a pressing prior engagement for 9 pm is frowned on in these circumstances.*** With the result that it’s now already the middle of the night, I am deliquescing fast, and I still have a blog entry to create out of airy nothing.
So I’m going to enlist some help. Jodi sent me two brilliant links a couple of days ago, and if she’s already posted them on her own blog and you’ve all seen them, well, too bad, you can either watch them again or you can go read something that will be good for you.
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=NQ78WHpGZ1o
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=WQ_-TOJhXXk
These will tell you the secret truth about publishing . . . the truth that no one else will tell you. All of us in publishing of course have striven to prevent any of this from being revealed to the general public . . . but it’s on youtube, we might as well give up the struggle.
Ha ha ha ha ha. I can tell just how much of a humourless† cow I have become after thirty-one years as a professional writer, because watching these I have to keep reminding myself that they are funny. Yes. Funny. The problem is that there are still a surprising number of people who think these are the secret truth . . . and too many of them write to me, or stand in queues at book signings. I’ve told you, haven’t I, that Hannah’s elder daughter Becki decided when she was younger that she wanted to be a writer when she grew up because writers get to hang around in their dressing-gowns all day††? This is cute in an eight year old.
But. Okay. These are funny.††† And I especially like the editor’s shorts.
* * *
* Where I wasted a lot of time wrestling with my computer. Gods. Mozart never had this problem. Lyke Wake Dirge is seven pages long!^ When I’m working on the end I can’t remember what goes on at the beginning! I am suddenly plunged back into my teens, writing my first novel shaped object, and feeling totally out of control!^^
^ Any Mozarts out there, writing symphonies when you’re six and a half and operas when you’re fourteen, please keep the snorking to a minimum.
^^ Note: wheeeeeee
** Including dropping off the HOUSE KEYS of Third House to my BUILDER who is going to START WORK BY THE END OF THE MONTH. It has taken twenty five months to get to this stage. And I admit I would have preferred to have it done before the global economy went pffft.
*** If I’d remembered the meeting I might have decided I was still too weak and feeble to go to practise. But I rang a very respectable touch of Stedman Doubles^ thus proving that the ME hasn’t eaten all of my brain, which was cheering. I was, however, sufficiently whacked afterward that I had the absolutely valid excuse of leaving before the meeting was over with because I was shortly going to be too tired and shaky to make it down the ladder to the ground floor . . . and I really didn’t want to spend the night in the tower. Cold. Dusty. Draughty. Being able to scarper is not worth having ME and feeling like a blot on the carpet, you understand, but . . .
^ yaaaaaaaay. I want to say something about how being a really bad ringer means that the thrill of doing something right never wears off, and thrills are nice. But ringing Stedman is such an effort when you’re a talentless buffoon that the extent of the thrill aspect becomes kind of embarrassing.
† English English is sometimes even more insane than American English. My spelling moved east when I wrote OUTLAWS^ and never moved back again, and eventually the rest of me moved east and joined it. But my spelling has also never been one of my strong points and putting ‘u’s in things is a ratbag. Okay, why isn’t there a ‘u’ in tremor? But there isn’t. And sometimes when you tack stuff on the end of a ‘u’ word the u comes back out again. ‘Colour’ tends to hang onto its ‘u’ pretty consistently: colourful, colourless, colouration. But humour . . . it’s humorous but humourless! This ISN’T FUNNY!
^ I say nothing about my phrasing and usage, which tend to be blindingly American, except when I’m muttering things like ‘knickers in a twist’ and ‘popped his clogs’. The worst is that between Middle Aged Brain and having lived here twenty years I can no longer differentiate.
†† Barring those of us with hellhounds.
††† EXCEPT FOR THE COPYEDITING JOKE. THE COPYEDITING JOKE ISN’T FUNNY AT ALL.
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