Backlist
I am better today. Of course I then went into hey! I’m better! overdrive and am now . . . shattered.
But Fiona was here today* and I took her up to Third House. I’d been planning to take her up to Third House this time and then Fluey Thing manifested and yesterday I was scowling out of my heavy swollen eyes and thinking with my heavy swollen brain, dranglefab it it’s always SOMETHING. So we went up anyway.** Besides, I was better. Or I was better at least till I spent two hours hauling boxes of backlist upstairs to the attic*** while Fiona wrestled with the adjustable shelving in the Large Cupboard That Is Mostly Staircase. Adjustable shelving seems like such a good idea till you actually . . . try to adjust it. £”^*$%)!!! I heard at intervals as I toiled up and tottered down stairs. In almost any other situation I would feel that heaving backlist around is the really bad job and I am pitiable but gallant to be doing it. In this case Fiona was definitely getting the short end.†
It always bemuses me a little when I read other authors’ blogs and tweets and they’re saying, my new novel just sold in Luxembourg/Outer Mongolia/Guam! I don’t keep track.†† In fact I tend not to notice.††† And since Oxfam will take books in other languages, when mysterious parcels arrive full of book-shaped printed matter in which ‘Robin McKinley’ are the only words I recognise, they usually go straight back out the door again to the Mauncester charity shop.
But a few of these indecipherable objects have nonetheless accumulated over the years, especially those with unusually spiffing covers, the kind that you pick up out of its box and a small hot throbbing star bursts behind your retinas and you go, Wha’? Which I thought I might, over time, share a few of with you since some choice samples today fell out of a box (mostly containing copies of the British edition of WATER).
I can’t remember, have I posted the famous French BEAUTY with the naked blue girl covered with feathers before? I had a whole little travelling show of editions of BEAUTY through the ages with which I used to have ’em rolling in the aisles at meet-the-author appearances. Maybe, as more backlist emerges from the dust and shadows, I’ll try to reconstruct it here. Meanwhile, even if you’ve seen it before, I feel it’s worth another calm, hushed, meditative contemplation:‡
Next consider this:
Even if you speak Italian, I don’t think translating the title is going to do you much good. Maybe I should offer as a prize a copy of it (in English) if you can guess which book it is.
Now tell me about the flying car. 
* * *
* EVERYBODY PAY ATTENTION for a moment. Your mind can wander later. But Fiona took what I fondly believe to be the last of the stuff I owe you all out there to the post office today. So if, in, say, a fortnight’s time, a book or an ARC or a signed sticky label I promised you months ago has still not arrived . . . email me, or a mod if you prefer. One of the great Oceanic Dragons may have eaten your parcel, or it may be my brain which has failed to inspire the production of the parcel in the first place. As I wrote to someone recently, my brain would make a really bad sieve, the holes are too big.^
^ I was answering his request for a signed sticky label, telling him to email me again in a fortnight and make sure I’d done it. His follow up email arrived today . . . and his sticky label went to the post office with Fiona.
** I was telling Fiona sadly that as Pooka’s^ memory filled up with astonishing speed as soon as I started loading operas on to her^^, I had regretfully to give up the idea of smashing the Walkperson with a hammer, because I needed the extra space. I said to Fiona, I wonder if I gave it a name if it would help my attitude? A minor plague, possibly, to carry on the theme from Apocalypse? And Fiona immediately said, Rubella. You can call her Ruby. —Hee hee hee hee hee hee hee. I’m sure Hannah’s daughter won’t mind.
^ YAAH. SHE’S BARKING AT ME. . . . Have I told you that I’ve set her ringtone to bark? Well, it’s only fair. Darkness, Chaos and Apocalypse. I keep thinking that I should give her number to a few more carefully-selected people+. Not only am I paying all this money to have her permanently and instantaneously live++, but if she barked at me a little more often I would probably stop jumping out of my skin every time it happens.+++
+ . . . At the moment it’s just Peter. He’s coming back from playing bridge and wants me to turn his soup on.
++ I’ve got more minutes a month phone time than a month has minutes, but to get the other stuff, chiefly the unlimited internet, you have to pay for thirty-six days a month of phone time. They tried to sell me the forty-two days a month of phone time package and I said, uh, why?
+++ It’s a lot easier to not accidentally turn Pooka off than it was the RaspBerry. Progress.
^^ Fiona, while sympathetic in a perhaps slightly disengaged way, has an iPod with 1,000,000,000 megagigablergabytes. The sun will have gone nova before she has actually listened to everything she’s got loaded on it.+
+ Although not a single opera. This is very sad.
*** The attic with the Famous Weight-Bearing Floor. Not to mention a loo, four velux windows and a fitted carpet, and the Staircase That Ate A Bedroom. All I wanted was the floor.
† I couldn’t even ravish her with kittens. I was kind of hoping Phineas would go away this afternoon, because if you stick your head in the conservatory and chirp, hellkitten will probably come running. But Phineas, most annoyingly, seems to have stayed home all day.
†† This is only one of many ways in which I am a total failure as a self-marketer.
††† If you say my name to the foreign rights assistants at Writers House they will probably scream in harmony and beat their heads on their desks. I have a habit of losing foreign contracts instead of signing them in duodecimet and returning them. . . . Oh, ratbags. I’ve only just remembered that I unearthed the Turkish^ contracts for PEGASUS yesterday. They were supposed to go to the PO with Fiona today. They didn’t. I hope the WH foreign rights assistants don’t read this blog.
^ Sic. I don’t think I’ve sold anything in Turkey before.
‡ Blue? Feathers?
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