Another day, another ratbagfest
So, do you want the bad news or the bad news?* I dug out what used to be the rest of the first draft of PEGASUS, back when it was all one book.** There’s about sixty pages of it, which, as first drafts of my novels go, might be about a third of PEG II. There are two characters I’m very glad to see again; I thought about trying to winkle one of them into part one, but decided against it. He’s not really someone who can hang around semi-invisibly in the background. Once he’s on he’s on. The other one . . . the other one’s worse. I didn’t even think about trying to introduce him early.
But . . . I’m not sure how much of my old 25,000 or so words I can use.*** I was kind of afraid of this. PEG I developed a life of its own, as it was supposed to, and it went, predictably and unpredictably, if you follow me, off in all kinds of new directions—including at least one I had had no notion of, erk—while the sixty pages of what used to be Part Two snored faintly and waited for daylight and the wake-up call.
Just how bad the news is is yet to be revealed. But what I’m not going to be able to do is sit down and start typing page sixty-one.†
Meanwhile, in another part of the forest, I had forgotten how much I HATED FRELLING FINALE. Finale, you may recall, is my music-composing software. ARRRRRRRRGH. I haven’t touched it in several months because I am a bad person and because I had this novel to finish.†† I’ve got a few things lying around semi-legibly on manuscript paper that it would behove me to get onto the computer before ‘semi-legibly’ becomes a mere memory of believing I knew what those squiggles meant. And while I’m hanging around worrying about what the copyeditor is finding in PEGASUS I’ve been banging and discordanting through Frost and Fire and Ice and I would quite like to be able to take it to Oisin tomorrow. Finale seems to have other ideas.††† They all seem to have pointy ends and smell of brimstone.
* * *
* Bad news is, of course, relative, as is good news. Update on Luke is good, but docs say we still have to wait another two or three months even for a long-term prognosis. So we applaud what progress there is, and keep praying.
We now return to our regularly scheduled programme of frivolous crankiness.
** And . . . just by the way . . . this is good news. I had had a little trouble locating it. Does. Not. Bear. Thinking. Of. I’m frelling sure I printed it out for safe keeping, after I whacked it into two books. I’m a paper girl still; if it’s not ink on something I can cut my thumb on^ it’s not really real. But I haven’t been able to find the actual pages of hard copy. Eventually I tracked it down on my old retired memory^^ stick, which is a loyal and noble creature, and hastily and gratefully ran it off. Which of course first required my printer to have its standard hissy fit over the use of American-size pages.^^^ This is always fun. First you turn the printer on. Then you click on ‘properties’ and reselect, for the umpty millionth time, American 8 x 11 paper. Then you click ‘apply’. Then you click ‘print’. Then you stand back while the printer starts beeping loudly that it’s a British machine and it’s not having anything to do with that crude misshapen colonial stuff, and please to observe a gracious sufficiency of red error lights and flashing error boxes and if I don’t pull myself together and treat it with proper respect it’s going to throw itself off the table it sits on and ruin the carpet when its toner cartridges explode.
^ OW. Blood. Frell.
^^ This being me, possibly the use of the word ‘memory’ is ill-omened. My case-hardened steel-trap stick. My small granite monolith stick.
^^^ I’m presently using up the backs of galleys of the Berkley trade edition of THE HERO AND THE CROWN. Now here’s a little story of authorial despair to brighten a grey January evening. While I was arguing with my printer I noticed that the next page waiting to have its blank side fed into the machine, supposing that the machine ever stopped having its hissy fit and commenced printing something, had two typos on it. This is pretty bad, I was thinking, for a book this old and this often reprinted; I mean, the reason I had proofs to read is that every time something is reset, it’s possible that a brand-new error may creep in. But not two a page, for pity’s sake. And then I saw the third one that I had not caught on the same page. Pleeeeease the gods that the publisher’s proofreader nailed it. I’m afraid to go check the book itself.
*** Twenty five thousand words I can’t use? Twenty five thousand written words I CAN’T USE? Waaaaaaaaaaaaah.
† I’d also forgotten how many major name changes there were in this one. What happened was that too many of them were Cr names. This is the sort of thing that happens in real life that you can’t do in fiction. There may be a group of friends named Crichton, Christine, Chrestomanci, and Crystal, but when John Buchan or Michael Chabon decided to make them into an adventure novel, he’d change their names. Sylvi’s dad won: he got to stay Corone.
†† For about five minutes I’m going to be rolling in cash. The check for PEGASUS has been seen and documented by Writers House and a really spectacular refund cheque^ has arrived from the British Infernal Revenue. I hope to manage to bank both of them long enough for one statement to come through, you know? With all those numbers at the top. Then most of it goes away again to dark ugly boring necessary places^^. . . .
^ Because I earned no money to speak of last year. Sigh. These years happen.
^^ Although I did buy myself a cashmere sweater on sale.
††† And yes, I forgot to record the second half of the MEDIUM I watched the first half of a few days ago. Of course. I feel I could have just forgotten instead of remembering I’d forgotten so now I have to wonder how it ends.
I want to suggest however that those of you who feel that nurses’ station alarms are routinely ignored, you may be confusing fiction with reality. In the programme this hospital has been set up as a good hospital. Although I may be missing the magical properties of nail clippers, wherein things cut with them carry on as if uncut.
I also find myself wanting to mention that while there are undoubtedly a lot of horrible hospital stories out there, and generally speaking I yield to no human being in my dislike and mistrust of the standard medical model, in one of my previous incarnations as an ambulance driver^, I’ve stood at a number of nurses’ stations where alarms went off and people ran. Just like on a TV programme.
^ It’s called wanting to make one’s microscopic imprint in the right direction. This is also how I’ve ended up a homeopath.
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