Okay . . . *
. . . We’re on. I’ve heard from my editor; she says it’s still worth a shot at the autumn ’10 list for PEGASUS and how fast do I think I can do the rewrites—? Unh. I won’t actually know till I have. She hasn’t yet given me (or Merrilee) the uber-final, drop dead, drop dead or drop dead, deadline when it has to go into copyediting—if it’s going into copyediting for next autumn—it’ll be November, but November is four weeks long. If it’s the beginning of November I’m in more trouble than if it’s the end of November. But I’m afraid the short form is that I’m back to the rockface with my plastic spoon.** Sorry guys. Trust me, I am not spinning this out just to keep you reading Days in the Life for updates. ***
This however brings up another painful subject. If PEG I comes out next autumn . . . I am going to feel morally obliged at least to try to have PEG II in for autumn ’11 . . . which would mean writing the thing in about ten months.† And this seems to me even less likely than getting PEG I in for my editor to read by 8 October just passed, having not stormed through to the end of the third draft till the middle of September, which was spectacularly unlikely enough. †† I mean, yes, I have some of the first draft written already because it was originally all supposed to be one book . . . but I had quite a bit more of the first draft written when I sat down to finish it as one book a year ago, and see where that’s got me. And even if PEG I slips to spring ’11 . . . I’m still going to be trying to get PEG II out a year later.
It’s not going to be one of my nicer, jollier, more relaxed years, whether the countdown starts now or a few months from now.
And . . . I’m officially about to chop back another day of my frelling overtexted blog entries: probably (ahem) Mondays; I’m going to have to work more hours more evenings. I take a lot more photos ‘for the blog’ than I ever get around to posting†††, for example, and I have an awful lot of funny links I never get round to posting either—the kind I wouldn’t mind seeing again even if I’d already seen them on someone else’s blog. And I hope to continue to torment people into writing me guest blogs. . . .
* * *
* I’m late, mindblown and distracted by the fact I’ve been watching Lucia di Lammermoor all evening. Sky Arts can go for months without showing anything I want to go near with a sharp stick and then they’ll have a little rush of opera—they’ve done this to me before. And I could have recorded it, except this is how I end up with .002% free space on the recording gizmo^ so I thought, never mind, Lucia is very silly, I just like the noise, I’ll watch it. What do I have to do tonight anyway besides a few more pages of PEGASUS, write a blog entry, hack at He Was Despised some more^^ because my voice lesson is tomorrow, practise the frelling Warlock so Oisin won’t snigger at me on Friday, find the homeopathic remedy(ies) that will have hellhounds eating promptly and eagerly every day for the rest of their lives, and distill a clean energy source from junked computers and plastic bags.
And then I went and wasted a lot of good global-solution-discovering time finding this new Met Lucia tremendously moving. http://www.scena.org/blog/2009/02/met-in-hd-lucia-di-lammermoor.html I agree with him about the tenor. You wouldn’t know he’d stepped in at the last minute; and that awful final aria poor Edgardo has to sing after Lucia has totally ripped up the scenery in the mad scene he delivers with aplomb and commitment: you feel not for the tenor, but for the character. But I don’t agree with this reviewer at all about Netrebko, and I’m not even a drooling fan. Zaftig? Frelling spare me. I did notice a slight dearth of fancy high notes but I still found the mad scene compelling . . . and sad, which is harder to bring off, because the crucial thing about Lucia is that she’s such a depressing little wet. It’s difficult not to feel that if she’d had a little intestinal fortitude earlier on she wouldn’t have been goaded into sticking a knife (repeatedly) into the husband her ugly-piece-of-work brother has forced on her.^^^ I love the music but the story sucks poisonous toad slime—and a less-than-first-rate performance will leave me thinking too much about its absurdity and feeling too little of all the great washy emotions that opera is so good at. Star crossed lovers! Dying! Whee! Something I would like to see some day is a Lucia who never collapses on the floor and rolls around in despair however. I think it would be possible to play her as merely crushed by circumstance; I think she could stand up to her disgusting brother even as he’s convincing her that her true love has betrayed her; I think she could at least stay on her feet when the priest advises her to submit. I think if Micaela can be played as a woman rather than a fluffy bunny, and the production of Carmen we saw at Glyndebourne last year proves that she can, someone can bring off a Lucia who dies because her entire social structure is stacked against her, not because she has the moral conviction of overcooked spaghetti.
^ I tell myself this is a better system than having two-thirds of the sitting room given over to stacks of dusty videotapes. Ten years ago, when I spent my year and a half on the sofa with acute ME—which is also when Peter bought me the it-was-a-monster-then-but-there-are-much-bigger-now TV we still have—is the one time in my life since TV tape and playback systems were invented+ that I began to catch up on all the stuff I taped.++
+ Do you realise# that when STAR TREK: THE ORIGINAL NONSENSE came out, you only saw each episode once? If you were lucky they showed most of that year’s again during summer rerun doldrums. But that’s all. Forever. I was Marked for Life by this experience: it’s another of those things that will keep turning up here, because it’s about How Technology Has Revolutionised Our Lives. I also, later on, spent a lot of time on Greyhound buses going up and down the east coast to small art house theatres showing THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING. In hindsight recorders were inevitable. But to a geeky teenager with a seriously bad crush on Mr Spock this was on a par with fantasies like growing up to be someone who got paid for writing stories. That one still stops me cold occasionally. I what?
# I know. Some of you are old too, and remember.
++ It wasn’t worth it.
^^ which after listening to Anna Netrebko is going to be brutal
^^^ Although this leads to one of my favourite pieces of silly-ass operatic behaviour, which is the priest rushing out on stage to describe finding her bending over the body of her husband lying in a pool of his own blood, and brandishing the dagger with which she has just done the deed. What, you didn’t want to interrupt her?
** Actually I went back to it last Tuesday. And let me tell you, if it’s the beginning of November . . . it’s a spring ’11 book.
*** And just by the way, I still don’t know how the hell I got even the unfinished version in by the 8th. Miracles do happen.
† GAAAAAAAAAAH. That sound you hear . . . if I could bring it a little more under control, I too could sing the mad scene from Lucia. With the fancy high notes.
†† But miracles do happen.
††† And for example, if life will stop being so dranglefabbing exciting maybe I’ll finally post the photos of the brown velvet jacket tomorrow which I wore to the handbell wedding on Saturday.
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