Done. For a little while.
A very little while. The copyeditor, who is obviously a Higher Being, with titanium nerves and an All Night Brain, is going to have it back to my editor on the 25th, and . . . I’ll have a week to turn it around. A week! A WEEK! –Remember I was saying that one of my resolutions for 2010* was to spend less time on the blog? I think it will be safe to predict that I will be remarkably–even unrecognisably terse that week.
Meanwhile I am making hay while the sun shines.** Or anyway drinking champagne on an evening I don’t have to stay sober.*** Did I tell you about the Great Place Mat Quest? Peter is impossible to buy presents for, right? Well, he/we badly needed new place mats. They lead a hard life with us somehow. † . . . So, have you ever tried to find a set of waterproof cork-backed place mats with a different picture on each? Different pictures you want to look at anyway. I failed. But at least these are roses. I can pretty much stand to look at the same pink roses kind of a lot. And Peter . . . well . . . they’re waterproof and cork-backed and he’s not quite as preoccupied with things like domestic decorative bliss as I am. And I’d've been happy to buy a set of waterproof cork-backed clematis place mats if I’d seen any.††
Just in case you want a better look at the flowers behind the champagne bottle. Roses. How unexpected. Pink. How unexpected. Well, at least I’m spreading it around a little. And that rotting apple in the fruit bowl isn’t. It’s just a funny colour.
And the object itself. With chapter breaks.
Four hundred and sixteen pages. About 130,000 words. A mere bagatelle to Samuel Richardson or Marcel Proust ††† but long enough.
Long frelling enough. Now all I have to do is (a) survive the week following the 25th of January and (b) discover what I’ve done with the rest of what was still all one book before I chopped it in half last spring.
* * *
* Which the AP stylebook^ says we’re pronouncing ‘Twenty ten’. Which is a bit of a relief. I mean, how else were we going to pronounce it? All year denotations have gone to hell since the turn of the millenium really, and I’m not looking forward to mumbling ‘twenty eleven’ for a year.
^ You do know the AP stylebook, don’t you? http://twitter.com/APStylebook or if you’re still resisting Twitter+ http://www.apstylebook.com/
+ You have my complete sympathy. It eats your brain. Like so much else on the web.
** I wish. It’s going to snow again tonight. Waaaah. However on the recommendation of some Midwestern friends I finally bought some yaktrax http://www.yaktrax.co.uk/ for both Peter and me with the intention of surviving this winter intact.^ Next I need chains for Wolfgang, unless someone at the city offices has figured out where maintenance left the sand.
^ Peter keeps telling me, as I spill through the door at the mews with my latest meteorological complaints on my frozen lips, that when his kids were growing up they ice-skated at the local ponds every winter. I don’t care. This is not my southern England. I want my southern England back.
*** I have a piano lesson on Friday! I have a voice lesson next week! For that matter I have a terrifying assortment of bell ringing opportunities beginning tomorrow. Get thee behind me, Sa–I mean Niall.
† It wouldn’t have anything to do with chocolate. Or tea.
†† Actually I did. I found one set of waterproof cork-backed place mats with a variety of flowery things on them, including one clematis.^ I was thrilled. I ordered it immediately.
They had run out.
^ And no roses. I admit a qualm, but I was going to be strong.
††† Or JRR Tolkien
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