In which life trifles with me
In that way that life has. The day did not get off to a good start. I paid bills. Ewww. So then I had all these things to post. My all-Hampshire-weather-purposes hurtling coat has stupid pockets that you can’t quite get a normal sized envelope into, let alone several. But since I don’t walk anywhere without hellhounds if I can help it—that two-hour minimum daily hurtling requirement significantly curtails my desire to go out for any additional strolls—this means I take them with me even three blocks to the post box.* Since this was their first leg-and-bowel stretch of the day there was a good deal of picking-up-after to be done.
And I have a new least favourite thing in the universe. Some of you may recall that the previous incumbent of this exciting position was stepping in someone else’s dog crap while picking up your own. No. I have discovered worse. Worse is the envelopes in your badly-designed pocket falling out of your pocket and onto somebody else’s dog crap while picking up your own.
I will spare you the rest of this scene.
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I have mentioned before—grimly—that we live in a world of sequels, and that as soon as anything is good or popular, and sometimes when it isn’t, the next thing on the schedule is A Sequel!!! And the next thing after that is Another Sequel!!! And the next thing is . . . well, you get the idea. Some authors, some illustrators, some filmmakers, some butchers and bakers and candlestick makers thrive on this system. Some of us do not. Mornings** when I open nuraddin’s inbox for the first time that day and run the traditional jaundiced eye over a longer than usual number of unfamiliar return addresses,*** my heart sinks because experience tells me that some robust percentage of them, sometimes all the way to all of them, will concern the sequel to SUNSHINE. Which does not exist. I now have the address to the blog entry There Is No Sequel to Sunshine on my desktop where I can copy and paste it into reply windows quickly enough to give me barely enough time to mutter a short imprecation.† At what point, do you think, did the ease of both direct contact and available information on the web devolve some responsibility on seekers and questioners to do some of their own homework? Because it most certainly has so devolved. It was annoying and disheartening twenty years ago to get a steady stream of street mail letters demanding the third volume of the Damar trilogy [sic], but twenty years ago following a few mouse clicks to the news that Damar is not and has never been a trilogy, and that I may or may not write more about it during some presently unknown period in the future, wasn’t an option.††
I was moaning about some of this to a friend the other day, it having been a Heavy Virtual Mailbag Day and she replied:
I wonder if they have this vision of you with a mountain of books written, yet not published, sitting around your office as you think, “Nah–I don’t think I’ll publish THIS one unless 50 people email me before 2 o’clock Wednesday…” Do they think it’s like the home shopping network? “Call in the next 20 minutes, and you can have a sequel to Sunshine! This is a limited time offer, folks, we can’t do this all day!”
Snork. And the first hundred callers will get ABSOLUTELY FREE a cubic-zirconia-studded potato peeler with their order.
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* I have mentioned before my aversion to the post office itself. This intensified when they banned dogs. Don’t talk to me about the British national soppiness for their animals: it’s a frelling myth.
** Or possibly afternoons
*** I was contacted recently by a hot young writer about signing a bookplate for a friend of hers, and she mentioned in passing that her latest book is hooking four thousand emails a month. If I started getting four thousand emails a month I’d change my name and hair colour, dye the hellhounds and join the witness protection programme^. Or whatever they have over here instead of the witness protection programme.
^ Peter would object to the upheaval. We’d have to work out some system for staying in touch. Slouching around New Arcadia in our tweeds and Burberries, the hellhounds and I would be watching for signs. A chalkmark in a corner of the library window. A vase of pink flowers in the mews’ kitchen window. A blue balloon tied to the walk-light pillar halfway down the main street.
Peter and I would be a disaster at clandestine. We’ll just have to meet at the pub for a beer. No one will recognise me in a Burberry with two Dalmatians.
† Sometimes I don’t bother. Depends on how cranky I’m feeling and how many of them there are that day or there have been recently. Four thousand emails a month . . .
†† I haven’t handed down my final judgement on text emails. It’s very hard to quarrel with I red yr book 10 x u rock even while my inner schoolmistress is having spasms. And my attitude toward text-like abbreviations^ has undergone a revolution since I started Twittering. A hundred and forty characters. Feh. But in one thing my inner schoolmistress and I are united: if you don’t put a name at the end of a communication to a stranger, you are slime. I don’t even say it has to be your name but a name.^^
^ I do not pretend to have a clue about how real texters do it, and I have enough other stuff to learn, thanks
^^ As Robin Hood once said to a scrawny young man with a bad attitude
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