Waiting for an editor or someone like her*
Sigh. This is like travel times. When you know something is going to take one hour or six hours or six days, then you prepare yourself for one hour or six hours or six days, and if the six hour is six hours you’re fine, but if the one hour is six hours you’re a frelling basketcase. Well, I am.** Since I’ve handed in my last several books somewhat beyond the last possible due date***, I have kind of forgotten how long is normal to expect to wait to hear from your editor. But let’s say it’s a month. I’d be fine for the first two weeks. The third week I’d be getting increasingly twitchy. By the fourth week I would be thinking about nothing frelling else. I think if there’s any hope of getting PEGASUS on the autumn list I need to have heard by the end of this week.
It’s Thursday. It’s Thursday night.
Sigh.
It’s also the third anniversary of bringing the hellpuppies home. Well, sort of. The actual date is the 12th, but it’s the middle Thursday in October, and I think of it as that middle Thursday because of the street fair that’s held not far from here every middle Thursday in October. We drove through it that day† and by now it is a not quite sacred tradition†† to stop and have a walk round it, the three of us, admiring all the horrifying Your Life Will Flash Before Your Eyes Guaranteed or Your Money Back rides that I am delighted to be too old to need an excuse not to go on†††, the stalls selling abstruse ingestibles, I wouldn’t go so far as to call them food, and the audience. The audience is the best part. I like the groups of teenagers the best, I think, the ones that are Definitely Having Fun and the ones that are Equally Definitely Not.‡ This is particularly winning when it’s all happening within the same group. The drawback to teenagers—especially groups of teenagers—is that they have the lungpower for quite astonishingly decibelled screaming when one of the rides holds them upside down and starts shaking the contents of their pockets out over the interested onlookers. That should perhaps be underlookers.‡‡
The little kids are all whacked out of their tiny gourds from being held upside down and shaken, and from the ingestibles.‡‡‡ Every year I forget that really you don’t want to be walking around a town with a street fair going on down its main street. In the first place this means that all the quiet roads you’re used to being able to stroll down with your hellhounds are suddenly full of diverted traffic—cranky diverted traffic—and in the second place there are way too many prospectively whacked-out kids on their way to the fair and fully whacked out—indeed positively distended with whacked-out-ness, and taking long low bounding gravity-defying leaps as a result of this helium-like quality—kids going home. Hellhounds and I met a group of the former escaping the control of the mere two adults attempting to enforce it. We had just stopped for Chaos to perform an act of nature§, and I was getting out the black plastic bag to pick it up when around the corner came pelting toward us about half a dozen littles of various sizes from tiny to medium. The medium ones were for the obvious reasons of leg length in the lead, and the first one came to a crashing, cavorting stop immediately beside us . . . Chaos having just finished his act of nature, and me hoping to get it packaged before I had to cope with an influx of frisking children. I failed. This first cavorting child thought the hellhounds were delightful and wished to have converse with them. All the littler littles behind him were less eager, but they were lined up several small bodies deep watching the performance—and I’m trying to hold two hellhounds who would be more than happy to make acquaintance with someone who would cavort with them, with one tendon-straining hand while I’m stooped at a highly dysfunctional angle over a small squidgy pile on the ground that I would like none of us to step in. Perfectly nice cavorting child. Just misplaced.
And tonight was handbell practise—cut short because Niall, you may recall, was going on to ring a fancy peal on handbells—spliced, which means several different methods all stuck onto each other according to some predesignated plan, at least one of which methods I’ve not so much as heard of—after slumming it with Colin and me first as a kind of warm-up, I guess. We’re on for the frelling wedding this weekend—yes another handbell wedding—only it’s worse than that, I told you, one of Colin’s tower ringers has organised it so we’re going to have actual bell ringers in the audience, although not handbell ringing ones (if anybody else rang handbells, trust me, I’d stay home). Gah. I brought the assembled to their various knees tonight however by informing them that we’ve been engaged to ring handbells at b-twin’s sister’s wedding in mid-December—they were listening to me till I told them it was in Australia. It’s okay, I said, I told her she was responsible for travelling expenses, and she’s working on her lottery ticket. Niall said, you know, I’d probably get away with it: Penelope has been to both New York and Egypt without me in the last year. Colin said, well, I wouldn’t get away with it, Anthea would want to come along and visit her cousins. Maybe I can trade in my business-class ticket—b-twin is paying for business class, isn’t she? Absolutely, I said—for two economy. How fast can she learn to ring handbells? Niall said. We can teach her on the plane going out, said Colin. Which will get us put off the plane in Abu Dhabi or Kuala Lumpur, I said. We’ll wait till we’re past Singapore, said Colin. She’s a quick study. B-twin lives close to two bell towers too, I said. But we have to be home in time for Peter’s birthday.
We’ll work something out.
And tomorrow is Friday. Waiting . . .
* * *
* There must be a few old Firesign Theatre fans out there? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waiting_for_the_Electrician_or_Someone_Like_Him
Actually this is a joke I tell myself at this point of every book, so I may have used it two or three times here already. So it’s the traditional Firesign Theatre Waiting for My Editor joke.
** This is a big reason why going to cons and things got old. I’m sure everyone has a list of airlines they’ll never go on again, but my list came to include every airline there is. At which point I realised I had a problem.
*** As previously observed, I have a very patient and adaptable editor. The only thing to be said in my favour is that I do write good books. I just write them slowly. And she’s been publishing me for quite a while now, so I’m a known slow, late pain in the neck.
† Perhaps that was the moment they simultaneously threw up
†† Speaking of traditions
††† And my glasses would fall off. And the hellhounds would probably throw up again.
‡ I am also riveted by the catwalk aspect. Hoodies and All Stars (and black jeans) rule^, but what is the ski hat thing? The ski hat with earflaps thing? Huh?
^ I’m also pleased to see a little flare-up of heavy black tights with denim shorts. I am much too old. But I’m still tempted.
‡‡ Ow. Spare change hurts from a height.
‡‡‡ I can’t believe parents let their kids eat this stuff. I realise teenagers are beyond jurisdiction or sanity.
§ Chaos is, I might add, supernaturally gifted in the Stopping for a Crap at the Worst Possible Moment realm. Something about either us passing groups of people or hearing a group bearing down on us seems to bring on abdominal peristalsis.
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