Chapter Something
It has not been a great few days. I managed to fall down on level ground, cold sober, and without assistance from hellhounds—my feet just went out from under me, WHAM.* One of those where you have no recollection of falling, you know? One moment you were upright and the next minute you’re horizontal, and you hurt. Although I acknowledge it makes a graceful shape, I wish to protest the evolutionary choice of the middle finger being longer than its fellows: when you stretch your hand out as you fall, what happens? You land on the end of that finger, all forty tons of you**. Frelling ow. Anyone mentally disordered enough to be still reading this blog after two and a third years may remember I did this two (and nearly a third) years ago, to my right hand. This time it was my left—and, crucially, I was not hung over from the dranglefabbing sedative one of minions of the dentist of R’yleh had given me the day before and . . . I seem to have managed to hurl myself onto my right knee before measureless damage was done to my left middle finger. Sigh. Well, I don’t have time to play the piano*** and I can type all right. I’m even more or less walking.
And the Christmas present for Peter I was most pleased about† because it was something he actually wants . . . has been cancelled. The company is out of stock and not expecting any more in. Aaaaaaaaaugh.
And when I came back to the cottage after ringing practise and settled down with a nice bowl of steamed organic broccoli . . . my broccoli is full of bugs.†† Note: never eat raw organic broccoli. Cooking makes the hidden protein float to the surface, where you have some hope of noticing that that fleck of mixed herb has legs, and pick it off. I also feel, in my wussy over-civilised way, that since I’m going to eat anything that I missed, I’d rather eat cooked hidden protein.
And . . .
. . . I’m behind on PEGASUS. In an absolute sense, if I could afford an absolute sense, it’s going well. But unless I hit a day or four where everything is perfect and I can just soar through some pages . . . I’m not going to make 22 December. Kill me. No, don’t. This isn’t the end of the world as we know it, to wit, a world in which PEGASUS is on the schedule to come out next autumn—it just means I don’t get Christmas off, and there will be more author corrections on the copyedited ms than there would have been if I’d finished before it went on to the copyeditor—and she will have wasted some minor amount of her time catching stuff I’m catching in parallel.
The changes on the copyedited ms are the last free changes on your book: then it goes off to the printer to be typeset, and you don’t get to do any more but the most minor fiddles after that or you have to pay for it.††† I am not, in fact, worried about making that final deadline—as I say, I’ll just have a few more corrections to send in with my responses‡ to what the copyeditor has done‡‡. But I wanted Christmas off. I wanted to spend New Year’s planting roses‡‡‡.
Sigh.
Back to PEGASUS.
* * *
* I believe the fatal substance to have been muddy, rain-slick leaves. Or it may have been an experiment in frictionlessness by the Gflytch, who are always looking for ways to confound humanity.
** allowing for the speed of your acceleration
*** I went round to Oisin’s today anyway, for a cup of tea and a scream. He also played me a Bruckner piece which was ravishing. I still had to go home and go back to PEGASUS.
† Peter, the Impossible Man to Buy Presents For. I’ve told you this. Not only doesn’t he want anything, presents make him nervous. You have to tie him to his chair and order him at hellhound-point to open his presents. And then he’ll say ‘very nice darling, thank you,’ and look at me with large haunted eyes, hoping this will be over soon.
†† Shut up, Black Bear. I don’t want to hear it.^
^ In case any of you missed it first time around, this is Black Bear’s view of broccoli: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DT1YLp1NL_k
††† Don’t ask me why, in these days of computers, this is still true. I can only tell you that it is, at least at Penguin Putnam.
‡ Which will range from ‘give that woman a gold star and an all-expenses-paid trip to her favourite chocolate emporium’ to ‘I want her guts on a plate and I want them now.’ Copyeditors are paid to be anal retentive—I should know, I was one for several years—which doesn’t always combine well with an anal-retentive writer, who may furthermore have had her control-freakery honed and strengthened by several years of copyediting . . . plus, for all my invective on topics such as less and fewer and the correct use of hopefully, the truth is, I don’t care if the Chicago Manual of Style says it. It’s my book, and while my applications of less, fewer and hopefully are impeccable, I punctuate by ear, and, similar to Raymond Chandler on the split infinitive^, a comma or a semi-colon or the absence thereof is what I say it is. Oh yes, and any more is two words.
^ “Would you convey my compliments to the purist who reads your proofs and tell him or her that I write a sort of broken-down patois which is something like the way a Swiss waiter talks, and that when I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will stay split and when I interrupt the velvety smoothness of my more or less literate syntax with a few sudden words of bar-room vernacular, that is done with the eyes wide open and the mind relaxed and attentive. The method may not be perfect, but it is all I have.” –One of my all-time favourite quotes+, since before I was a published writer myself, and had survived the tender mercies of various copyeditors. Generally speaking my copyeditors have saved my ass many more times than they’ve burnt it, but I, like every other published author, do have a few stories.
+ Barring the Swiss waiter. I have no experience of Swiss waiters.
‡‡ Or tried to do
‡‡‡ Weather permitting
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