My Head Is Spinning
I spent an hour and a half on the phone with Merrilee today. She had an agenda. She’s having a meeting with a bunch of publishing people next week and McKinley is on that agenda. And I think she still has fantasies of turning me into . . . well, I’m not sure. I start glazing over when she goes into Manhattan Business Mode. I live in a small town in Hampshire! I spend my life covered in hellhound hair and MUD!* Yes, I write stories!** Then someone takes them away and makes them into books and sells them! I don’t want to know!***
It’s been kind of a . . . week. First there was all this light, silly, stress-free nonsense of having a husband in hospital† followed by stomach flu†† followed by hearing from my editor on Monday. I was not at my best anyway and she was racing to get her notes to me because she’d promised them by Monday, and one way or another we kind of shot past each other and I ended up spending about forty-eight hours thinking that she’d just asked me to do a complete rewrite.
By next Thursday.
It was not a good forty-eight hours.†††
However we got that sorted yesterday, just in time for me to decide not to give up writing altogether and retrain as a plumber.‡
And the miracle is . . . yes, PEGASUS is still on for autumn ’10. I have no idea how my editor is planning on managing to cram it through‡‡ but she says she’s going to. And I am boiling forward on the (minor) final rewrites. You will remember that I was determined to get the final-but-tweaks in by my birthday, so I could have my birthday off? Well, I’m going to get the final-with-tweaks in by the 24th of December so I can have frelling Christmas off.
PEGASUS. The endless saga. Because, as everyone‡‡‡ immediately says when I tell them the story thus far, And then you have to start on the second book right away, don’t you? YES. YES. HAPPY NOW? YESSSSSSSSSS. Frell.
Meanwhile the relentless approach of Christmas is trying to force itself on my unwilling attention. I’m not entirely sorry to be working my tail off till Christmas Eve; it means I don’t have to go to any parties. So sorry . . . have to get back to work. I know I’m ringing two extra services this week. But ringing is ringing; it doesn’t involve standing around holding a mince pie§ and making conversation.§§
Now, what was I just saying? So sorry . . . have to get back to work. Besides, I’ve already had my chat for the day: tea break over handbells with Niall and Colin.§§§ Not to mention talking to the indoor jungle. Which is indoors again. # I’m also tired of mopping the frelling kitchen floor: if it’s not mud off paws and All Stars it’s mud off plant pots. I wonder if I’d have any better luck teaching a geranium to sweep up after itself than I have the hellhounds. . . .
* * *
* When the mud doesn’t come naturally, I can create it by having the hosepipe explode off its coupling when I’m in the way and startle me so much I take an unwary step backward and sit down involuntarily in a bucket of compost.^ Compost which is now, also, wet. Sigh. Mack Sennett lives on. At the moment, however, we are not having a lot of trouble coming up with ways to be effortlessly covered in mud.
^ The miracle is that this doesn’t happen more often, given the conditions of gardening at the cottage.
** I also seem to be writing a blog. And a Facebook page. And Twittering. I’m still wondering how that happened.^
^ Merrilee has arcane powers. Next question.
*** Yes, well, would that I had to know less about the interim stages, upon which topic these virtual pages have seen calm, considered, thought-provoking entries previously. And PEGASUS is another long book. Every time I read it through again . . . I’m older by the end.^ Still to come: Copyediting. Aaaaugh. Proofreading. Aaaaugh. Final umpty-mumbleth pass proofs AAAAAAAAAAUGH. Now start all over, only about jacket art. Aaaugh. Aaaugh. AAAAAAAAAAUGH. AAAAAAAAAUGH.
^ I mean aside from the clock time that has passed. Story time is another of those extra dimensions. The eleventh or the seventeenth or something. You know there’s probably a Schrodinger’s cat subtheorem tucked away in there somewhere.+
+ Verschränkung is certainly totally applicable. I have no grasp of quantum physics aside from the fact that it looks really cool, and that trying to read about it, as here http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qt-entangle/#1 puts me into a kind of half-exhilarated, half-terrified trance not wholly unlike the process of writing a story.
† Yes it was a tiny little surgical procedure. It was still an operation! General anaesthesia! Knives! Blood! Cthulhuian car parks!
†† Which I more and more think is to do with my ability to reach new creative depths of anxiety than about promiscuously touching door-knobs at the hospital. Whatever it was it involved an awful lot of me lying on the sofa and telling Peter, still oozing blood, to stop fussing over me. Arrrrgh. We can’t get anything right in this household(s).
††† I’d’ve been glad to trade places with Schrodinger’s cat.
‡ Plumbers make good money. Ahem.
‡‡ Clearly she too has arcane powers.
‡‡‡ Thanks guys. Thanks soooo much.
§ Remember: itty bitty individual British mince pies. Twenty times the pain in the neck to make and one fiftieth of the credit from your audience.
§§ Although it’s not so bad with a gang of other ringers. You sidle up to one of the really, really good ringers and ask something about method construction . . . and relax. The really, really good ringers mostly long for captive audiences because there are so few of us. Remember that by scaling the heights of touches of Stedman doubles^ I’m automatically in, I dunno, the top 10% or so of ringers,^^ and the pyramid above me gets pointy really fast. So the angels dancing on the head of the pinnacle are mostly pretty lonely. Wild Robert in a mood even madder than usual last night^^^ was trying to explain spliced to me. No! No! No!^^^^ However, if I find myself at any Christmas parties with ringers in the next few weeks I know what to ask.
^ I did this again last night, to my own total astonishment, especially since One of Our Number was coming unglued elsewhere.
^^ Snork. Cough cough cough cough. True though. Lots and lots of call-change+ ringers out there, usually because they haven’t got the critical mass of good ringers to drag themselves any farther up the slope into method ringing. I’m in one of the little pockets of good ringing around here, where my grim mediocrity is recognised for what it is, and even I spend quite a lot of time ringing stuff for people farther down the learning curve to bounce off of.
+ All right, more than you want to know, but there are fancy call changes too. I’m not talking about them.
^^^ He was probably surprised by the Stedman doubles too
^^^^ It’s pretty much what it sounds like. You’re already ringing a method and your evil ratbag of a conductor suddenly shouts the name of another method and you’re supposed to switch over to the new one immediately and seamlessly from wherever you are in the pattern. The ‘seamlessly’ is usually the problem.
§§§ Speaking of good ringers to practise questions on.
# It was already down to 36F by 8 pm. I hope I don’t find myself skating back to the cottage tonight.
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