Nope
I didn’t make my PEGASUS deadline today. I probably knew by the end of last week that I wasn’t going to. Sylvi—my heroine—goes off and has adventures, as my heroines are wont to do, and when she comes home again, all kinds of things have changed, including her. Followed by my Frodo-was-alive-but-taken-by-the-Enemy ending, and you’re not going to be able to turn the page and find out what happens next for at least a year, and . . . well . . . let’s just leave it as ‘at least a year’. I decided I needed to [insert verb that does not exist in English here*] the last thirty pages a little more to bear the weight, as it were, or possibly the drag into the bottomless ravine, of that ending, and the waiting that follows. Part of the difficulty is that when Sylvi comes home it’s no longer home** and she spends those last thirty pages going the high-fantasy equivalent of ‘huh?’ a lot, not knowing what is happening or what to do. And the story is told from her perspective. Now, you can get away with this in the middle of a novel***. It’s called ‘transitional’. Not so much the end of a novel, even if it’s only the middle of the story. Dranglefab. More frelling learning curves. Isn’t learning to sing/compose/ring bells† at my advanced age enough?
So I’d more or less just finished exchanging emails with my editor yesterday—we having agreed we’d make the final decision on Monday—when the news about the car crash came in. No, there isn’t really anything more to tell you today. If we’re lucky we should know something by Christmas—if we’re really lucky we’ll know something good by Christmas—last night they were saying 48-72 hours post-surgery. But while there’s nothing either Peter or I can do besides sit by the phone/computer and wait for it to ring/ping, the waiting is pretty grisly.
And about PEGASUS, the Novel with The Ever Retreating Final Deadline . . . 4th January. That’s when everyone at Putnams goes back to work.†† Pre-car-crash I was saying drily to Peter and Merrilee that the irony is that if my deadline really had been Christmas Eve, as I’d declared in the first place, I’d’ve probably made it. Drat Christmas anyway. But post-car-crash I’m moving a little slower and my concentration is a little more fragile. I wanted Christmas off.††† Well, I’ll have time for yet another read through now. I’m not sure I’m bouncing up and down with glee about this.
* * *
* Sharpen? Hone? Focus? Expand? Rework? Redirect? Rearrange? Brace? Fortify? Reinforce? Rejuvenate? Rip to frelling shreds and start over? No.
**PhD thesis support alert^: I think I was born and built or built and born to be an outsider, and even if I’d grown up number four in Cheaper by the Dozen I’d’ve still felt I didn’t belong. So far so normal; it’s a common enough trait among those of us driven to do weird stuff like obsessively write stories. It’s also normal to find out at some point that you can’t go home again, whether you’re a nutca—a sensitive artistic type or not. I’ve told this story many times before but it is one of those informing moments of my life, and every time I find myself doing something like it to yet another heroine I remember it happening to me: coming home after five years in Japan, where I was clearly and absolutely a foreigner, and finding out that America was no longer home. This was also during the first drowning high-water mark of my passion for LORD OF THE RINGS and you all remember what happens to Frodo when he gets back to the Shire, don’t you?
^ and don’t bother telling me I’m giving myself airs, there are already a few PhD theses out there on me, although I don’t know or anyway don’t remember if any of them got accepted and granted their strange-topic-choosers any doctorates
*** THE HERO AND THE CROWN, say
† On the subject of ringing bells. Someone posted to the forum the other night in response to my snarling about keeping the Old Eden tower ringing with almost no help from the locals, that possibly they don’t realise they’d be welcome in the tower, possibly they don’t realise that we really need more ringers. Sorry, but this is a sore point. We’ve done everything BUT lock them up till they agree (ref another poster’s she-thought-she-was-being-funny-but-if-it-worked-we’d-do-it suggestion) to try and convince a few of them to stick around and learn to ring. We’ve put ads in the local newspapers and parish magazines, posters on what’s-happening-in-this-town bulletin boards including in the church vestibule(s), since we need ringers at New Arcadia too, just not as acutely, Vicky has done talks at schools and the WI^ etc. We used to have tower open days but Vicky says they NEVER EVER ONCE GOT ONE learner out of them^^ so since open days are a pill to organise we don’t any more.
And I know from my own experience that as soon as you say anything about coming along some practise evening to give it a try to some congregation member or even ordinary joe on the street complimenting you on the sound of the bells, they instantly go all shifty. Part of the problem is that they think it’s a difficult skill . . . and they’re right. It’s not hard to get to basic call-change-ringing competence, but it does (usually) take several months, and unless you find you LIKE bells, you probably won’t bother. And if you do like bells, then you’re really frelled, because unless you’re young and talented, you have one unglefarb of a steep and bumpy road ahead of you, learning proper change-ringing.^^^
I wish I knew what the magic ingredient is—what herb you sneak into your victim’s tea^^^^ that will make any dormant bell-ringing urge leap to active life. It is a totally addictive skill, but you do have to put yourself in the way of becoming addicted, which includes a lot of time on the end of a rope, and a lot of time being direly convinced you should have taken up knitting instead. Which is when you need friends like Niall to talk you out of any dramatic renunciations.^^^^^
^ Women’s Institute. It’s not a lot of fluffy coffee klatchers. http://www.thewi.org.uk/
^^ Which surprised me, since that’s how I started the first time, eleven years ago.
^^^ There are in fact a lot of people out there who get to call-change ringing or possibly plain hunt or treble ringing and . . . stop. But this is so utterly alien to my own frantic little personality that I’m not going to try to discuss it. And a call-change-only ringer on a Sunday morning when there are only three or four of you is still a blessed event.
Oh, someone on the forum asked if we were ringing Christmas Day. Yes. I have to get up early on Christmas morning to go ring some frelling bells.+
+ Okay, maybe there is a reason why not everyone who reads this blog regularly has rushed out to sign up at their nearest bell tower.~
~ Two hundred miles? Oh, stop whinging.
^^^^Eww, what is in this, it tastes like feet/water from a vase of really dead flowers/cat pee
^^^^^ No, no, you don’t want to learn to knit, knitting needles are sharp. . . .
†† And yes, it’s still on the autumn ’10 list.
††† Yes, I know I can take Christmas off. And I probably will. But the book will still be sitting there sort of looking at me.
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