Person falling down
Person got to bed late last night, even for me, and then didn’t sleep very well, which is tedious.* So I’m even shorter of sleep than I would be if I’d at least slept the hours I was horizontal and if I weren’t in an ME phase when I need extra stupid sleep. Am I making any sense? I doubt it. I have already spent all my allotted sense-making time today on PEGASUS and Peter’s book, and possibly on walking hellhounds, which does require enough sense-making to get home again on. Walking hellhounds also requires a majority of staying-upright rather than falling-down time, which is a further strain on a floppy system, especially when sheets of leftover black ice keep rushing out of the undergrowth at one murmuring mwa ha ha ha ha. And now I have to go to bed again, early tonight, because I have to get up in the morning and go ring bells.
So this is me, going to bed before I fall down any more. . . .
* * *
* Very tedious, lying in the dark with eyes wide open thinking, you know, I need to get to sleep. I’ve got stuff to do tomorrow.^ There’s a short brutal list of crucial things that the harder you pursue them the faster they flee. Sleep. Money. Love. Hellhounds.
^ The self-employed always have stuff to do. Probably the human being always has stuff to do, but bosses and project schedules can blur the lines a little. Other people can tell me if blaming your boss is any use at 4 am. I’ve been self employed so long that I am my own worst nightmare. Mind you, many writers work competently and efficiently to deadlines, and do things like answer when some frelling editor wants to know where they are on some piece of writing they have, perhaps, contracted for and agreed to a date for delivery of: they answer both because they are professional and also because they know where they are.+ Some writers work hysterically and frantically to deadlines too, but the point is they acknowledge deadlines. I’m in the Douglas Adams camp on this one, except that I do not enjoy the whooshing sound as they go past.
One of the nicest things any editor has ever done for me is now many years ago. I know I’ve told you that winning the Newbery, while extremely pleasant for my bank balance, was very hard on the rest of me, because I was thirty-two years old, not the most self-confident woman ever to put on a pair of extra-high high heels so as to be taller than as many people as possible at the parties and things she is going to have to go to because she’d won the Newbery, and had people, at the parties and things, coming up to her and saying, so, what are you going to do with the rest of your life?, ie, now you’ve won the Newbery and reached the pinnacle of literary achievement. I went home after all the flimflam and had a kind of series of itty bitty nervous breakdowns. Or maybe not so itty bitty. It was five years++ between HERO and OUTLAWS, and then OUTLAWS only did so-so, which aggravated the I-knew-it-was-all-a-mistake-and-I’m-not-really-a-writer downward spiral.
Meanwhile I was running out of money. The Newbery does great things for your bank balance, but not nearly as great as winning the lottery or marrying the Queen of England, and I’d bought a little old house, and a medium-sized new car+++. So I’d signed another contract with another editor back before I turned OUTLAWS in. ++++
. . . Turned OUTLAWS in and regressed to staring at the walls. It’s not that it was another five years between OUTLAWS and DEERSKIN: it’s the fact that for about three of them I wasn’t getting anywhere with anything. I was writing, but I had no faith, and a story can only do so much for you if you refuse to believe in your ability to write it.# Then DEERSKIN sank its teeth into me and I was writing whether I wanted to or not.## DEERSKIN was the book that would go to that other editor who, at this point, had been waiting something like seven years for it. DEERSKIN wasn’t what she’d asked for or that I’d said I was going to produce, but it was a book.
And so I was thundering away on the first draft of DEERSKIN and had got to the point of being pretty sure this one was going to go after the last several years of not going with anything, and of thinking that I should write this editor–let’s call her Miranda–and tell her that she was, against all probability, going to get a book out of me after all.
When she wrote to me. Have I told you this story before? Very likely, because it’s one of my favourites. And I’ll tell it again some day too, so sit back and relax. When I saw her name and the publishers’ logo on the envelope### I was terrified: it had been seven years–maybe eight–and she was obviously calling the debt in. This is the real reason not to sign contracts too much ahead of yourself: if you don’t turn the book in the publisher is going to want their money back eventually. I can remember walking home from the post office, having not opened her letter yet, marshalling my arguments: surely she’d let me have another year now that I was actually writing the beggar.
And I got home, and opened the envelope . . . and it was a letter, completely out of the blue, because we’d had no contact about anything in a very long time, saying that she knew, because she knew me, that I was worrying about the old contract, and that she just wanted me to know that she absolutely knew that she would get that book from me some day, and that she was looking forward to it–whenever it happened. And whatever it turned out to be. And that she hoped I was well and happy.
Life frequently sucks, and events kick you in the head after they’ve knocked you down first. Which is why I like telling this story####, because it’s about events tenderly helping you to your feet, brushing you off, and giving you a big bouquet of roses.
+ These people, of course, should be killed. They make it so much harder for the rest of us.
++ although the copyright dates will tell you four
+++ And a washing machine. I’ve told you, haven’t I, that I finally knew I had arrived when I had my own washing machine and didn’t have to go to laundromats any more? Different devices for different people, of course. Mine was a machine à laver couchant proper.
++++ You want to be a little careful about signing multiple contracts with multiple publishers–for the obvious reasons. But it is one way of scrounging money, so long as there are still editors who will take a flyer on you.
# There are a few things from that shadowy era I hope to get back to, now that I’m older and crankier and take less crap from my demons. Shut up, guys! I’ve heard it all before and it’s boring!
## And as rough stints go, a lot of that book was
### I didn’t even have a computer yet
#### Especially on a day/evening/entry when I’m too cross-eyed and brain-wasted to think what I’ve done today
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