Eve of Doom*
PEGASUS goes back to my editor tomorrow. And this is the real moment of decision. Not that the terrifying swoop to the 8th of October deadline was unreal**, but now is when we find out for sure if PEG I is going to be on the autumn ’10 list or not. Last time it was ‘are we going to make a run for it?’, and the answer being yes, we have spent the last five weeks running for it. I don’t like working this way; hurtling is for hellhounds, not for cantankerous old bats.*** And—I was this afternoon rereading my editor’s email from October to make sure I hadn’t missed anything—it is amazing the stuff that falls out when you’re swooping. In hindsight it seems to me I was so busy worrying about the tricky bits that I managed to lose several rather crucial basic structural elements somewhere during the rewrites. A sort of extreme version of your knowing the story so much better than any reader ever will you don’t always realise what help you need to give them to make sense of the part of the story you actually get written down. If I hadn’t been doing the faster-than-a-speeding-hellhound† thing I want to believe I would have noticed before I turned it in the first time.
Well, I’ve noticed now††, and I hope I’ve fixed it. Them. Is it absolutely, poured-cement, nailed-down finished?††† No. Is it more or less finished? I frelling well hope so. Tomorrow, anyway, I get off. I will send PEGASUS winging its way toward Manhattan some time tomorrow morning, and will spend the rest of the day wandering around in a semi-post-book daze. And opening presents. The only question is whether I might conceivably give myself an entire week off before I start in again, and do stuff like move furniture at Third House and finish planting all those bulbs I was actually ahead of schedule with last month . . . and, as I keep saying, I have thirty rose bushes coming any minute, now it’s November . . . or not. Niall‡ has some handbellers coming Tuesday evening, as he usually does about once a month, but I can never spare the time. Hmmmm. . . . .
* * *
* It’s also my frelling birthday tomorrow. Granted that at my age the night before might well be considered Eve of Doom^ but in fact I’m having trouble remembering that tomorrow is my birthday. I’ve had several parcels arrive in the post the last few days and I look at them and think, why are these people SENDING me things? —Oh. Peter was upstairs for a long spell this afternoon while I was downstairs WORKING^^ and I kept vaguely/crossly thinking, what is he doing?^^^ I was so blind and stupid from working that when I finally got up to take hellhounds out for their second hurtle and was putting their harnesses on at the bottom of the stairs I could hear him up there making scissors-and-tape noises and it still took a minute for me to figure it out. He’s been saying things like, do you want to take a taxi so you can get ploughed?^^^^ And I’m like, what? —Oh. This afternoon he said, what time should the taxi pick us up, d’you think? —Taxi? Oh. Oh yeah. Tomorrow. Tomorrow?
^ But this is why I start calling myself a year older the summer before, so I can have got used to the idea
^^ On a Sunday afternoon! The day before my birthday!
^^^ Remember I subscribe to the category of desirable companionship wherein I want someone else in the room breathing+ but for frell’s sake don’t talk to me. ++
+ You’re allowed to be doing something. You can read or cook or yell at your laptop.
++ I ought to be the perfect dog thrall. Unfortunately the hellhounds are also chatty.
^^^^ Peter would never say ‘ploughed’ for the overimbibery of champagne.
** Surreal, yes. Unreal, no.
*** As a hellgoddess with, furthermore, a somewhat imperfect grip on reality, I feel that bats should be involved somewhere.
† Here it is stubble-field season when hellhounds get off lead relatively frequently^ and Chaos has lately decided that he doesn’t want to run around, he wants to divebomb Darkness.^^ Darkness doesn’t want to be divebombed, and with his continuing back troubles I don’t want him divebombed either. Try running [sic] interference between a couple of hellhounds who go into red-shift blur as easily as I trip over a tussock. The one thing they agree on^^^ is ganging up on me. And the current manifestation of this is that they—mostly sequentially, which is thoughtful of them—like to get between my legs and bite the inside of my thighs. Ow. Hey. Hey. Well, this does at least make getting them back on lead again really easy.
^ when it isn’t tipping it down so relentlessly that we never get far enough out of town for fear of drowning in a mudslide
^^ Three years old. Yup. Three years and three months.
^^^ of course
†† With a little help from Merrilee, Peter, and my editor
††† Squirrelling through various of the piles around my desk at the cottage, where things do mount up, I found a newspaper clipping from . . . um . . . a year ago exactly. The Saturday Guardian has a series called Author, Author and Hilary Mantel has written for it several times. I’d like at this point to give you a link to the column in question, but while I usually defeat the Guardian’s deeply perverse search engine, it’s winning this evening, or perhaps Author, Author isn’t on line. If any of you are cleverer than I am about hoodwinking search engines, the column is—yes—from last 15 November. And it begins: ‘I’ve finished my book at last. . . . How do you know you’ve finished? A much revered writer once told me that a certain novel of hers—a novel later shortlisted for the Booker prize—was finished when her publisher sent a courier on a motorcycle to take it away.’
I like this. I also like: ‘If you write on the screen, as I mostly do, you have a programme of rolling revision . . . I remember how my first published book came together, back in the prehistoric typewriter age; I wrote it in longhand, typed it, then typed it again. This now seems both hideously laborious and pathetically inadequate. . . . The received wisdom among writers is that it is essential to appraise your work on paper . . . my experience is that on paper you make one set of corrections, but when you go to input them, you make quite a different set—the paper version shows up the problems, but not necessarily the solutions. Then you print it again, find another set of problems . . .’
Yes. All of that. I wish I could give you a link. Well, if Mantel publishes a book of essays (which she doesn’t seem to have done yet, I’ve just checked amazon), pick it up. This particular essay is perhaps extra-amusing because she’s talking about WOLF HALL that went on to win this year’s Booker. Now that I can give you a link to: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/oct/06/booker-prize-hilary-mantel-wolf-hall
‡ There were three of us to begin with for service ring this morning. But by the time the three of us had got the first six bells rung up there were five of us, which meant we could ring doubles. By the time we had rung some doubles, there were seven of us. Edward called for bob minor, which is six working bells. Now, Niall is notorious for becoming one with the wallpaper^ as soon as there is a superfluity of ringers. He’s really quite amazing at it; teleportation is the only plausible explanation. In this case I actually saw him^^ drifting toward the wall. On practise nights you generally have to peel me off a rope, but I am Not at My Best on Sunday mornings^^^ and I was unusually well placed for shirking. I darted ahead of him and sat down. I outflanked Niall! This does not happen! He stared at me in sheer staggering disbelief and then turned back and took his rope again. Mwa ha ha ha ha ha! I win!
No I don’t. Vicky decides to leave early. Aaaaaaugh. So I had to ring after all. I furthermore had to ring inside because Penelope had already snabbled the treble. As luck would have it I was next to Niall who could hardly stop giggling the rest of service. Ratbag.^^^^
^ There is no wallpaper in our bell tower. Just whitewash, which comes off when you lean on it.
^^ Possibly as a result of practising watching red-shift hellhounds
^^^ Especially Sunday mornings when I’ve had about five hours of sleep when the alarm goes off.+
+ It was worth it though. We had sunlight! We had blue sky! It was amazing!
^^^^ The story of my hard life doesn’t even end there. We finally ended up with ten ringers for eight bells. Penelope and I+ looked at each other and said simultaneously: I could have stayed in bed!
+ This is a trifle relative in my case. Penelope and Niall live far enough away from the tower that opening one eye on Sunday morning, looking at the clock, saying naaaaaah, and rolling over again is a possibility. In my case the blasted bells will drive me out of bed, so I might as well already be upright and have mainlined a sufficiency of caffeine to get me to the tower before this happens.
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