8 October
NO DAYS.
Okay; it’s done*. It went in. About 6 pm my time . . . while everyone is at lunch in Manhattan. Instantly got an ‘out of office’ robot email from my editor, so I wrote to her assistant saying, she knows it’s coming so presumably she’ll be checking her email, but would you be kind enough to LET ME KNOW WHEN IT ARRIVES? Supposing it does, and the out-of-office isn’t some kind of warding programme.**
Two and a half hours pass. I fidget. I stare into space. I walk hellhounds.*** Surely people are coming back from lunch/meetings/their secret lives as intelligence agents and alligator wrestlers†/walking their three-headed dogs. I’m watching the clock and twitching, as it’s starting to get kind of late in Manhattan too, and today was the deadline. So I had just started writing an email to Merrilee’s assistant saying, is everybody playing hopscotch or Snakes and Ladders†† or talking to their nanny†††, please ACKNOWLEDGE, if I need to resend, I want to KNOW. And then, email ping! And again, ping!
The Large Flying Creature Has Landed.
And . . . thank you all. I’m sure all those thought waves swept PEGASUS and me on at a speed we were incapable of attaining on our own. But I do feel compelled to warn you, aside from my standard fit of ‘oh, it’s rubbish, it’s rubbish, it’s RUBBISH’ . . . I really don’t know how I managed to cram it through in the last three weeks, and it is unfortunately quite possible that I didn’t cram enough of it through, and that it needs more work than I can give it in (say) the short breathing spell between now and when it would have to go to copyediting, if it were going to copyediting for publication next autumn. Working this fast and this hard is not the way to do your best work—my best work anyway: I’m not a deadline junkie—I’ll know for myself after I start working on it again how much there is to do, but my poor editor is going to have to read the whole thing through at quintuple speed so she can decide whether or not to put it on the schedule. So chances are we’ll all know next week some time, even if I’m still sailing through some of the good bits and wondering if I’ve got away with it.
I’m concentrating at present on the idea that even if the news is bad, PEGASUS is still salvageable. The story is there. I may just not have done enough with my plastic teaspoon on that rockface yet.
Stay tuned.
And thanks again.
* * *
* Well, it’s not done. But that’s another story for next week. It went in in its Present Condition, which includes a time line in part two that resembles a cross between Spaghetti Junction and overused Silly Putty.
** This has happened to me. You send something, you get the robot ‘out of office’ so you figure okay, fine, at least it arrived, they’ll get back to me when they get back. And then they don’t. Because they never got it. Out-of-office was playing goalie with a ray gun and a three-headed dog for extra shielding. Caroooooooom goes my small hapless email into the outer reaches of the galaxy.
*** The standard afternoon hurtle the last few weeks of PEGASUS-fixation has been walking the loop down along the river to the cottage and then back to the mews via a variety of playing fields. When I’m not beating myself to death with a keyboard I pause at the cottage to do a little gardening but that hasn’t been happening recently. But it does mean I can check my phone machine for more frantic last-minute pleas for wedding ringers^ and my front stoop for packages bearing large labels that say LEAVE BESIDE HOUSE BEHIND GATE BEHIND WATER BUTT where, among other things, there’s a little roof so that when it rains I don’t come home to cardboard pulp on my front stoop. Snarl. Anyway. There was a package today.^^
I refer occasionally to the fact that I love clothes. And that while certain concessions are made to the facts that I work at home in the company of two large^^^ hairy hellhounds with whom I go for long muddy brambly walks every day and that I can’t stop buying rosebushes, which need planting and feeding and weeding and pruning, still, some of my favourite light reading is clothing catalogues. Big emblazoned SALE banners and I start drooling like Pavlov’s dog. Last spring a catalogue I like had a hoodie that called my name in a loud and unmistakable manner. Hoodies are like All Stars: I’ve been wearing them since before today’s hoodie- and All-Star-wearing fashion icons were born. I was wearing hoodies when they were even less cool than All Stars at their nadir: and that is uncool.
Anyway. There was no way I was going to pay full price for this thing but I liked it in the colour I was pretty sure was going to be unpopular, so I decided to keep an eye on it. And, lo, it went on sale a couple of months ago. But it didn’t go on sale enough. And it was still available in even the good colours, so I figured I could wait some more. I said to myself, if it gets below £x, I’ll order it.
Weeks pass. With email you get nearly daily updates on all your favourite catalogues; I have half a dozen I actually open and look at. Us writers need small idiot excitements like this to keep us in touch with life and three dimensions.^^^^ And then one day, lo! My hoodie has fallen below £x. By one pound. Never mind. And in my size only my unpopular colour is still available. So I stick it in my virtual shopping basket, have a cruise through the rest of the offerings for anything to keep it company—yes: brown velvet jacket with brown velvet roses on it, fabulously on sale, it never occurred to me it would come down to my price range—and then leave it for twenty four hours, which is what I do to make sure I really mean it. I’m a little dangerous with on-sale clothing catalogues. And I have a weight-bearing attic floor to pay off.
Decide I really mean it. Go back to virtual shopping basket. My hoodie has sold out. Frell. All right, all is not lost, continue to keep an eye on the situation; they may have returns. Another fortnight or so passes. Double frell. Oh well. I didn’t really need another hoodie. . . .
They’ve had some returns. It’s back again in my size. So I order it—and the brown velvet jacket—fast, before they change their minds, or their stock-taking.
The brown velvet jacket arrives . . . alone. (And it’s delicious. So that’s okay.) On the invoice it says of the hoodie ‘cannot supply’. What the (*&^%$£”!!!! does that mean? It probably means ‘we didn’t really have any returns, somebody hit the wrong key in the warehouse’. ARRRGH. Okay . . . I didn’t really need another hoodie.
About five days ago I got an email saying ‘your goods have been shipped’. WHAT? YES! They found a hoodie in my size! Lying under a forklift truck somewhere! And they’ve dusted it off and are sending it to me!
I’ve spent the last five days wondering what’s going to happen next—it’ll arrive in the wrong size, the wrong colour, the wrong item, the person who hit the wrong key in the warehouse has hit another wrong key, this time telling me I’ve got something coming . . .
Nope. It’s here. They sent it. It’s in the right size and the right colour. It was lying on my front stoop (in a cardboard box with a large label that says PLEASE LEAVE BESIDE HOUSE . . . ) this afternoon. And it’s cute too. But then I like hoodies.
Life. Three dimensions. Yes.
^ We have one tomorrow that we had our first request for last Thursday. One wants to know if they left the wedding to the last minute, or just the idea of having bells.
^^ It’s been a beautiful day. Just the sort of day you would like to be out in the garden planting bulbs. Sigh. It’s supposed to rain again tomorrow . . . but this is a good thing. I haven’t done any housework in like the last month and I have a friend I don’t see very often coming on Saturday. The sort of friend I kind of want to protect from reality.
^^^ They’re large in terms of hair production.
^^^^ Yes. It is that bad. See? You don’t want to be a writer.
† http://urbanlegends.about.com/od/alligators/a/sewer_gators.htm
This was my favourite urban legend back in the days before ‘urban legends’ were a commonplace.
†† very suitable for publishing
††† What do you mean you’re in Houston/a traffic jam in the Lincoln Tunnel/jail? My kids get out of school in twenty minutes!
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