Must. Finish. SPINDLE.
The page proof corrections for the new reissue of SPINDLE’S END are due tomorrow—and I’m reading the princess’ birthday ball. It’s going to be a long night.
The proofs are, I think, pretty clean, their main failing being the entirely deranged way the instant word-snapping programme, which comes FREE with every offset-lithography-or-whatever-the-frell-it-is-these-days package sold in the industry today, bites words in two at the ends of lines according to rules passed down by the masters of Atlantis, who did not, of course, speak English.*
But the good news is that I’m back in with a chance—not a good chance, but a chance—to get PEGASUS done for next autumn. (Rather to the detriment of proofs-reading, but hey.) By Friday two days ago—when, as it happens, Putnams sent me some jacket ideas in case they had to produce said jacket by next autumn, and I wanted to Kill Myself**—I knew it was all over but the whining. I was going to have to moonlight as a hat check hag because I wasn’t going to get PEGASUS done in time and I would be broke by the end of the year. I may still not get PEGASUS done in time*** but I had a really brilliant day yesterday and have climbed back up over the lip of moiling disaster and am standing on solid ground again (for the moment). † Semi-solid: I’m in that interesting stage where the book is slightly more real to me than most of my life†† so I may appear to be hurtling hellhounds, stuffing flowers in vases, exchanging pleasantries with my husband †††, writing blog entries, etc, but what I’m really doing is wondering how many sisters the queen has and how many brothers the king has and shouldn’t I know who the heir marries?, and whether they get snow in winter where they are. The pegasi do, but their country is higher up in the mountains. I’m particularly confused because while I knew there was a little overlap here and there ‡ SPINDLE is positively infiltrating PEGASUS and I’m not absolutely sure I’m going to be able to untangle and winkle it back out again tomorrow when I send off corrections, a bit like hauling a hellhound out of a hedgerow containing both pheasants and barbed wire. Let there be no blood. Please.
Must. Finish. Spindle. . . .
* * *
* nee-
dlework, for pity’s sake. And just by the way I don’t think ‘other-consonant-l-e’ is a sylla-
ble, so you can’t break it there anyway
daz-
zled has been stretched over the end of one page to the beginning of the next, and let me tell you ‘zled’ at the top of the page looks weird. I think I’ll name something/someone ‘zled’ in some future chronicle.
du-
rable This is one of those breaks that to my eye turns it into some other word. Something to do with rables.
stoi-
cally And these are clearly two entirely different words—there are stois and there are callies—and I have no idea how that hyphen got there at all
trou-
ble and
trou-
bled FOR GODSSAKE KILL THE PROGRAMMER. I’ve had two, count ’em, two software designers^ in the last three days watch me read proofs and mutter, who interrupt to say in puzzlement, why don’t they design a better automatic system? —Why not indeed?
^ . . . who also ring bells. Colin was actually reading over my shoulder while we were waiting for the bride on Friday, which I permitted because he was the one with the car.
** Although the roughs are not bad. The one I like best is nonsense—not their fault, they haven’t read the book—but it’s pretty. I wanted to kill myself because here they are helpfully offering me jacket illustrations and I haven’t got a book.
*** Probably not hat check hag. I don’t think there are any hat checkeries in walking distance. Maybe I could get a job at Penelope’s tea shop.^
^ Note: Niall slipped me the handbell money this morning at service ring. Yaay. Penelope had had a word.+
+ Blogmom takes me to task occasionally for blog entries that are opaque to anyone who isn’t a regular reader with a good memory for trivia. This is not the way to increase my audience. So: Niall, my chief partner in bell crime, both hand- and tower-, is married to Penelope, who is the substitute owner for the local tea shop when the owner wants a day off, for example to go to her daughter’s wedding. The whole stramash is Penelope’s fault: it’s Penelope who opened her big fat mouth when the tea shop owner said rather wistfully that the church her daughter was going to be married at didn’t have any bells, and said, what about handbells? My husband rings handbells. —Pander.
So Niall, Colin and I rang this frelling wedding on Friday . . . and didn’t get paid. So Penelope had a word with the tea shop owner/mother of the bride. Who claims to have delegated paying the ringers, and the delegated forgot. That’s her story and she’s sticking to it.
† Please keep those candles burning.
†† I did have an enough is enough moment this afternoon. They were going to be ringing a quarter of Grandsire Triples for evensong so I left both SPINDLE and PEGASUS and harnessed up the hellhounds and flew^ back to the cottage from the mews to listen. I could have kept on working. I could have. But I didn’t. I had an hour in the garden.^^ It was lovely. There’s nothing better than gardening in good weather to the sound of change-ringing bells.^^^
^ Nearly. The hellhounds don’t have quite enough lift to get me off the ground. Gods know they try.
^^ Maybe . . . um . . . two. Maybe even two and a half. After the bells stopped I forthrightly turned on the radio.
^^^ After I once had a phonecall ten minutes before pull-off saying that one of the ringers wasn’t going to make it because her husband had just had a heart attack+ and asking if I could possibly fill in, I am now a little twitchy until I’ve heard them start.
I was up later than I should have been last night reading proofs, as well as spending today tap-dancing on the noses of fractious alligators++ which is the experience of the final panicky headlong rush of getting a book ready to go to your editor, so this afternoon I was particularly glad the phone didn’t ring.
+ He came through fine
++ Keep moving, and don’t fall off
†††Peter is reading the sports section. I might not have noticed at once^ but he said humbly as he sat down with the paper, I know I swore on our wedding day never to read to sports section^^, but this is research. –Sure it is. Just like my cruising on-line clothing sales ^^^ when PEGASUS is giving me hell is research.
However all is forgiven on the Peter front because he gave me this poem today:
Bridge and Married Life
Bridge is like life, in that you’re dealt your luck
And then must modify it with your skill,
And it’s a partnership, in which you’re stuck
With having to discuss, for good or ill,
Complexities that infinitely vary,
Using a sadly crude vocabulary.
I’d asked him for a lullaby about pegasi. He gave me that too. You’ll see it . . . later.
^ although it might have been a dangerous shock to an overworked system when I did
^^ This from the man who used to watch American football. The BBC did a high-points round-up of the various games which Peter used to watch with an unhealthy interest. I spent my first several years as an exile reeling from the shock of discovering that I had crossed an ocean and two national borders and had still found myself married to a man who watches American football. But then the schedule changed or something and Peter was broken of his addiction and I Breathed Again.
And all of you whose fingers are flying to your keyboards to defend American football from my heinous remarks. . . . have fun. If Peter couldn’t convince me that it is a fascinating and complex work of performance art, you’re not going to.
^^^ Some of the peculiarities of my wearing apparel are explained by the fact that while I have a lot of clothes—I’m been the same size for three decades and I never throw anything out—they’ve almost all been bought on sale.+ This does not make for coordinated, complementary, flawlessly accessorized ensembles.
+ My other salient weakness is shopping on holiday with the friend I’m visiting, or vice versa. Yowzah. Biiig trouble.
‡ Although confirmation won’t come out of its closet wearing a banner and a pink feather boa and dancing the fandango until book two. The war is also in book two. Frell. I wonder who dies. I hate killing people off. I also hate the mail I get that says, why did you kill —– ? You’re awful and mean and horrible and I’m never going to read another of your books.
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