A Few Pages After the First
No. Not quite. Nearly. Tomorrow. I know I said that yesterday. Well, I’m more caught up than I was yesterday. It still seems to me going well. I can risk saying that (I hope) because I know there will be days between now and the rmmph of March when it is not going well, when I am not a writer, I never was a writer, and I’m starting my retraining as a mechanic* in the next uptake.** Which is to say I know I’m going to be paying for good days whether or not I admit to having them so why not admit it? See: wrestling alligators, below.
Stardancer
I learned how hard it is to make a story. . . . I did learn to take something in the range of horrible/okay and shove it around into okay/pretty okay, even if I didn’t think it was anything I’d want to read. It’s HARD. I’d never realized before how much work it was, even for those gifted people in my classes who did “hear” their stories right off. Drafts and voice and tweaking and word choice and why is that character there again?
Thank you. Yes. It’s HARD. This is why The Urge to Kill people who offer to split the money with you if they give you their Great Idea and you do the dull stupid labour of writing it up because the idea is the hard part and besides you already have the name and the publishing contacts, is pretty overwhelming. Fortunately most of these offers come by post/email. Back in the days when I went to more live things and people used occasionally to offer this blithering asininity to my face civilised restraint was more difficult.
But. Yes. It’s like wrestling alligators. WHY IS THAT CHARACTER FOLLOWING ME AROUND? GO AWAY. YOU DON’T BELONG IN THIS STORY. Er. Do you? What have I missed this time? Writing is also brilliant and fascinating and enormous fun . . . but those alligators bite hard. And the regeneration of major body parts is tiring and demoralising and takes time, which you probably haven’t got.
EMoon
It’s downright scary sometimes how much your process is like my process…the whole thing about each character’s voice, each book’s voice, each book’s vocabulary, so sometimes I can’t hear the word I need–none of the first/second/third choice words works in that sentence and I can spend hours digging through dictionaries hoping to find the one right one. The stuff I have to write down (revolving door, uniform, etc.) that has to come out later because who cares, it doesn’t matter only some of the details DO matter and I don’t know which ones until the book’s done or nearly done.
Scary? Hmm. I find it exactly the opposite—this seems to me so obviously the way stories must break into storytellers’ brains, get heard/figured out, get written, that I find it far more unsettling when I hear about some other writer’s entirely different process. Those people who write out complete outlines—story arcs, what happens in each chapter, characters’ names, descriptions and relationships—people who create files on different aspects of story and characters before they ever settle down to write the story part of the story—that’s scary. I went through a period when I was a teenager of (mostly) secretly reading everything I could get my hands on on how to write—secretly as one pursues any vice, or any unadmitted longing—and some of the advice clings round me still in cold, sticky, cobwebby sorts of shreds. I absolutely believe in ‘whatever works’ but . . . brrrr for the file-keepers.
I mostly don’t write down stuff that will come out later. I tend to have faith that if I’ve left something out it’ll clamour to get into the next draft. Certainly stuff does come out, but not usually the revolving door and the doorperson’s uniform. But I do keep some notes as I go, and sometimes the marginal notes to the notes to the notes (to the notes) get a little cramped.
* * *
* jaccairn
Also, MOT – I think I remember that yours is due sometime this month, It’s the sort of thing that might slip your mind when you’re so busy.
Snork. The things some people’s blog forum members remember. Thank you. Yes, Wolfgang is due this month and I’ve already booked him in.^ I hope you’re impressed. I’m so impressed I can hardly bear myself. (I think this is the first year I’ve ever remembered before the last minute.) Now I just have to implore the weather gods to be kind since the remains of the bus system between here and Warm Upford is not worth discussing. Hellhounds and I can perfectly well walk home one day and walk back the next, but not if we’re having gales and hail and winged monkeys and so on. Which we’re apparently going to have overnight. This is all because Peter had planned to go to Oxford tomorrow and have lunch with one of his cousins. No, no! said the weather gods, shaking themselves out of their long winter slumber, we can’t have promiscuous peregrinations! Where is that blizzard, we know we put it somewhere! —It hasn’t got up to freezing the last three days^^ and now we’re supposed to have SNOW. Ah . . . frell. Well, my yaktrax have been lonesome so far this winter . . . and snow will certainly keep me at home where I have nothing better to do than work. . . . ^^^
^ And he has to pass. Has to. In the first place I can’t afford a new car this year. In the second place . . . I still don’t want a new car. I want a new car less and less as I hear friends with shiny new cars talking about the way the computers in new cars run their lives. And go wrong, of course. You can learn to ignore that little flashing red light on the dashboard after the third time you’ve taken it in and paid £100 to be told there’s nothing wrong. Not so much the robot voice continuously telling you to fasten your seatbelt/add grinchflobby fluid to the ziggury system/placate the trolls with ham sandwiches.
^^ And my chocolate cosmos hate being indoors, so they’ll probably frelling croak this year too. Arrrgh. Furthermore, my gladiola bulbs arrived today. Gladiola bulbs are tender. Mail warehouses are rarely heated. At least mail warehouses where tender plants are held are rarely heated. Arrrgh. Don’t these mail-order bozos ever, you know, listen to the weather forecast? Hey, guys, we’re supposed to get three foot of snow tomorrow! Let’s ship all the banana trees!
^^^ Ajlr
I also wondered what the reaction of the hellhounds had been to the new Amazingly Loud Voice?
Chaos has always found my singing . . . disturbing. Darkness has always assumed that it’s just another daft human activity. It is perhaps hard on hellhounds that both at the mews and the cottage their bed is next to the piano/cheap electric keyboard. Chaos gets up and moves toward me cautiously, staring at my distorted face for clues. GO LIE DOWN YOU WRETCHED DOG.
I’m more worried about the neighbours. Do you remember—probably nearly a year ago now—I was fretting about singing at the cottage, where my office, with the keyboard in it, has the common wall with my semi-detached neighbour? (The keyboard itself, plugged into headphones, is silent.) The wall is floor-to-ceiling with bookshelves, but I can still hear my neighbour climbing the stairs on the other side. Don’t worry, said Nadia, you don’t make nearly enough noise.
I think I probably do make enough noise now. Ah, the disadvantages of success. I can still sing while I do the washing-up—it’s on the far side from the common wall. I also sing out hurtling, while hellhounds pretend they don’t know me, and my impression is that people are starting to move to the opposite pavement (I used to think this was just a reaction to rampant hellhounds). Hey, this probably happens to Deborah Voigt too. I wish it had any effect on aggressive off lead dogs.
** The GUARDIAN is running a publicity draw to win a full degree Open University course. Details tomorrow. The OU is highly thought of so I, who don’t have nearly enough to do, had an idle look through their course list. Their language department is terrible. French, German, Spanish, Italian, Chinese, Welsh (Welsh?^) and Latin and (classical) Greek. That’s it?
^ Yes, I know, good for them, Celtic languages are struggling for survival, but in the context of only six modern languages offered it seems to me a bit startling.
First Pages
I have just been figuring out how much of SHADOWS I have to get through every day for the next thirty days.*
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAUGH.**
* * *
* Yes, I know. It’s already the 2nd of February and February is a short ratbag to begin with. But I’ve already told you I’m going to whine for a few days of March because February is indecently short.^ If my editor says ‘no’ I’ll sic Mongo on her.
^ Ask Frederic in The Pirates of Penzance.
** In case you’re wondering, yes, this does mean that I failed to reach my quota today. This is of course Very Bad . . . but it’s also not at all surprising. Or catastrophic. (Probably.) There are advantages to being old, wizened and cronelike in your chosen career: your standard errors and pitfalls become familiar, as do ways of coping with same, and less blood and hysteria are spilt.
I don’t know how common this is among the author sorority^ but one of the ways I know a story is ready to be written is that I know the first sentence, the first paragraph, the first page, the first scene. I know where to begin. Since my experience of writing is more about channelling or translating rather than some kind of pure feat of creation^^, and that the worst of the job is choosing the EXACT words, including what to write about and what to leave out—the famous getting character A from point B to point C problem^^^—being given a run at the obstacle to begin with is one of the ways I manage to wind myself up enough to begin. The first few pages of the first draft usually go down relatively straightforwardly and, as I work, which is not fast, relatively fast. Those first few pages of first draft usually feel—no, must feel—like a nice solid base . . . to start going spluuuuurgh smush GAAAAAH on, later.
In fact my first pages often change pretty dramatically over the three drafts. I get back to the beginning#, having learnt a lot about the story and characters in writing the previous draft, and realise that while the ‘voice’ is there it’s obscured by a lot of fluff and fuddle.## This awareness, not to say shock, tends to be most dramatic in stories told in first person, as SHADOWS is. Yeeep, Maggie would never say that. And then by the time I’ve got the first pages sorted (again) so that the book’s voice sounds as clear as I can get it at present, that draft is that much stronger because the first pages are . . . that much stronger. There’s a lot leaning on the first pages. If I haven’t got the first pages, I probably can’t write the book.
So I’m back at those crucial first pages again now. And this is the last draft.### Every frelling word needs to be right. I’m going to get words wrong because I can only write as well as I can, and I’m only too drearily mortal. But I need to get about 99% of the words right in the first half dozen pages. I can slip to 95% later on.
One of the peculiarities of this business of hearing the story’s voice is recognising it as different from your own. Well, duh. But it makes the translation/channelling/word-choice that much hairier, because you can’t just go for saying or describing something the best, whatever ‘best’ may be, you can. You have to do it with, and within, the story’s voice. There are times when I CANNOT think of another word for this or that~ that fits in the story’s voice. I can only think of how to say it in my voice. Arrrrgh. (So I highlight it, and keep going.) And I’ve given myself—or no, I haven’t, the frelling Story Council has given me—a trammel and a trickiness, this book: first person narrator, seventeen years old, in an alternative-modern world. (At least she’s a girl.) What I think of as my semi-forsoothly style, so any of my high-fantasy third-person-narration books, including PEGASUS~~, is the easiest base line for me the struggling scribe—although even semi-forsoothly varies from book to book because no book’s voice is like any other book’s voice. The bright sharp individual edge of a first person narration is a lot of fun, as is trying, an especially taxing exercise in these alt-mod stories, to ride the frelling slang till it settles down enough I start understanding it—but it also means that great swathes of my own vocabulary and my own way of expressing things are gone. Speaking of ‘yeeep’.
So. Anyway. I’ve done about half my necessary word-count today, but that’s not actually too bad. I’ve got several pieces of important slang imperfectly heard for two drafts nailed at last. I tend to ‘hear’ slang the way I ‘hear’ characters’ names, and especially when these are not words or names I know, it can take a lot of repetitions before I finally have what I need~~~.
Onward. Tomorrow I will catch up. By the end of tomorrow I will have accomplished the full page count for day two, as if day one had . . . behaved. —This sentence originally had the word ‘schedule’ in it but . . . that word and I have a matter/anti-matter relationship and I have a book to write.
^ Or even fraternity
^^ I wish. I’d love to feel that I was in control.+
+ Yes. I would write a sequel to SUNSHINE. And I would have finished PEG II this year. No, wait, I would have finished the one volume version two years ago. No, wait . . . it was an ELEMENTALS AIR short story. . . .
^^^ NO WE DON’T WANT TO KNOW IF IT’S A REVOLVING DOOR OR WHAT THE DOORPERSON’S UNIFORM LOOKS LIKE OR HOW MANY STEPS THERE ARE ON THE STAIR(S) OR WHAT THE COLOUR OF THE CARPET IS OR HOW MANY DOORS THERE ARE ON THE CORRIDOR OR HOW MANY GOBLINS WAITING IN THE LINEN CUPBOARD.+
+ An estimate of the goblins will do.
# Remember that I tend to write three drafts serially: first draft, beginning to end. Second draft, beginning to end. Third draft, beginning to . . . please the gods, end. I will go back and make notes or minor changes for consistency mid-draft, but mostly I keep going, and what I absolutely do NOT do is get bogged down rereading and tinkering. For me this is death and disaster. The story tells itself to me in flow and motion. My first priority is to keep it moving. I will read through the final draft after it’s FINISHED and tinker then.
## This time around this is reminding me of Nadia saying, at my first lesson, that she can hear what my voice is, and that we’re going to let it out of prison. The most extraordinary thing about leaving New Arcadia has been the live metaphor of my throat/voice/speaking up for myself—and singing. Nadia has always been able to get noises out of me I can’t get out of myself, but this week I swear I’m twice as loud as I was a month ago—before the sore throat closed me down. Twice as loud even when it’s only me reminding myself to relax my tongue and jaw and to let the air all the way in and to engage.
Wheeeeee.
### I hope.
~ Of course I am also afflicted with Menopause Brain.
~~ Despite the rabid gremlin infestation of other aspects of PEGASUS.
~~~ CHARACTERS MUMBLE. And since I’m mostly a ghost in their world saying ‘would you repeat that please’ doesn’t work. At best they probably stare at me and wonder what the cold patch in the room is.
SHADOWS?
YES.
DONE.
I just sent the finished second draft of SHADOWS to Merrilee and my editor. Pressed that email button. Zap.
And I’m so tired I could sleep for a week. Except I’m not going to sleep for a week. * I am going to take hellhounds on a long country hurtle tomorrow morning, I am going to order some plants for my garden(s) tomorrow afternoon**, and then I am going to go RING BELLS at Forza tomorrow evening.
And I will start on SHADOWS’ third and final draft on Thursday. Which I have promised for the end of February.***
But at this moment I am falling down with tiredness. †
* * *
* Well, maybe I can sleep for a week between now and tomorrow morning? Has anyone figured this out yet? It’s not quite the thirty-six hour day (or thereabouts) we all want, it’s just a little bulge off to one side about a little extra sleep. . . .
** The backlog of plant catalogues with corners of pages turned down has become a bit extreme. Also I have empty space to fill. There is nothing more beautiful to a gardener than empty space.
*** But I’ve already begun whining for a few days of March because February is so short.
† But I bet I could sing just a little before I fell down.
SHAAAAAAAAA. . .
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA AAAAAAAAAAAADOWS*.
AND IT’S THE 30TH OF JANUARY. NO. IT’S ALREADY THE 31ST. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAA AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGHHHH.
* * *
* I did go to my voice lesson. I told you yesterday, I’m getting even stranger, bent over my computer twenty hours a day^, and I thought it might even be good for me to go get strung out in a different direction, even if SHADOWS is frelling due frelling tomorrow.^^ Also I only just started singing again last week and—I wanted to go. It’s been a slightly dubious week in terms of practise—there’s still crud in my throat and all this emotional-aspect stuff makes me kind of jumpy—if you manage to miss with the carving knife you go to A&E, get some stitches and a lecture, come home, mop up the blood, keep the bandage out of the bath, be a little careful of yourself till the stitches come out, and hey voila, there you are. Another interesting scar. But when you’re trying to patch yourself together from some kind of immaterial wound, where and how you put the stitches in, and what constitutes the kind of bath you should keep your damaged limb out of—and what exactly the limb is—is not so straightforward. So I’ve been singing sort of cautiously, and of course I’m wildly out of practise and I have no time.^^^ Also, my voice still keeps disappearing on me—less than it was doing before, but every time it does I’m convinced that this is The End and I’m too old to be reaching for this nonsense anyway.^^^^ Nadia waggled her eyebrows at me in that disbelieving-teacher way and said, now as I remember it we found out last week that the chief reason your voice was dropping out was because you were letting it get cut off from its air supply. Oh, I said. Um.
So she made me frelling breathe for a while, and connect, and all that really annoying stuff you shouldn’t NEED to be told over and over and over and over and over and OVER. But you do, because you’re a moron. And then she ran me up and down some scales and some exercises and kept reminding me to breathe and to connect, and I could actually feel the air sinking down and lying with this lovely rounded, grounded weightiness at the bottom of my pelvis, and every now and then I also remembered to let it out again, and carry my voice with it. I had already admitted that occasionally this week when I wasn’t convinced I still couldn’t sing and was therefore producing a self-fulfilling prophesy of squawks and silences, I’d made a few noises that were fuller and freer than what I’m used to . . . and with the teacher-magic she teased them out of me today, and convinced them to bring friends. I was singing back up at the top of my range again—which I haven’t even tried at home since before I was ill, because I have been too busy feeling fragile, convalescent and overworked—and I was loud—me! Old no-voice me!— the kind of loud your average local amateur choir would be happy to have yelling from its benches—loud the way I don’t sing, especially at the top end where my brain is busy saying, no, no, wait, we don’t do that. Nadia stopped me where she did not because my voice was failing, she said, but because my brain was closing me down.
But. There’s life in the old cow yet. Mooo. Yaay. And I came home again all exhilarated and threw myself into SHADOWS.
^ That leaves two for hurtling hounds and two for sleeping. Other crucial activities like eating chocolate can be performed coincidently while typing.
^^ Later today. Shut up.
^^^ And the twenty-fifth hour is for singing practise.
^^^^ I actually raised this with Nadia today. How big an embarrassing moron am I being, taking voice lessons at nearly-sixty? For some reason I’ve heard like half a dozen times this last week that sopranos lose their voices really early and it seems sort of fated to be hearing this over and over again when I’m convalescent from the throat infection that had stopped me singing altogether—and ten months off my sixtieth birthday.+ And she said, two things: there’s no reason you shouldn’t last a good while yet as a choir singer—it’s professional sopranos that fold predictably early because of the colossal demands they put on their voices—and you’re lucky—you’ve got all the alto notes too. If you need to slip down to sing alto, you can.
::Beams:: Good. On with the voice lessons, then.
+ And before you answer that, I added, let me say that while this is all contingent on you being willing to teach me, I’ve already figured out that I’m in it for the journey. Never mind that thirty years ago I’d’ve had no voice to train either, all this trying to bind yourself together in a seamless whole to produce a sound is fascinating, even if the resultant sound is nothing much.
A little tangential Mongo and some Ask Robin
Note that I could die for Mongo Fangirl.* But if I write another word of SHADOWS right now I will explode into messy little pieces. And I am going to my singing lesson tomorrow. And probably bell ringing tomorrow night.** I’m starting to get all strange and lumpy from being bent over my computer so all-consumingly.***
I have no brain to organise a blog post, but I might be able to blither along a little. So let’s have a couple more Ask Robins for framework. Which I may or may not manage to answer sensibly.
I realized during this readthrough that I had been taking for granted that the different ways to be a vampire meant Con is the vegetarian of vampires. Rarely killing, rarely human meals, etc. But this time through, I realized that he made no such statements. Am I reading too far into his beneficence?
Yes. He’s a vampire. He’s a proper vampire. What he doesn’t do is torture people, the way Bo does. The thing about Con is that he has a genuine sense of honour. He accepts the obligation accepting help from Sunshine has put him under . . . and then later recognizes that an alliance is the best chance for each of them to survive Bo’s vengeance. Despite the charge between them being allied with a human woman does not make him happy.
What I don’t know, and one of the (many) reasons I’d love to write that missing sequel to SUNSHINE if it ever came through the mail-slot and landed on the door-mat†, is what effect a long-term alliance with Sunshine would slowly wreak upon him. Because it would. I have a better idea of what would happen to Sunshine if she continued to hang out with him, although I’m sure there would be surprises in the telling because there always are.††
My question is: Was Pegasus intended from the outset to be a multi-volume story?
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO. Here clearly speaks a reader who does not read the blog. PEGASUS started life as a short story. As a story for ELEMENTALS SPIRITS: AIR. Waaaaaaah.
I ask because I have found you notable for avoiding the ubiquitous trilogies, sequels & series that have dominated the fantasy industry since Tolkien.
Nearly all your tales, even if set in Damar, are uniquely fresh, creative & different. Esp. the new kinds of magic in each, like the weather control in “Water horse” and the honey-based magic in Chalice.
Whimper. You know I do hope this doesn’t mean that the second two gliggerfrandanging volumes of frelling PEGASUS are going to be stale, lacking in creativity and over-familiar.††† And if I live long enough I’d like to write another story or two in both the Water Horse and the CHALICE worlds—among others. On the one hand I like the way most of my stories have tended to burst out of new holes in the walls between the worlds, but on the other hand . . . I’d quite like to have a chance to consolidate a bit, get some decorating done, put down carpets and put up bookshelves in some of these worlds. I’m a nest-builder (you should see my house(s)). I’d like to do some nest-building in my stories.
I have read Beauty and The Beast 3 times and I am going to read Rose Daughter soon! Since the story of Beauty and the Beast is such an old tale I was wondering where you got your information from, which you used to base your books off of. Reason being I always love to see where a story first came from. I would be thrilled if you could tell me the books or other sources where you got your ideas from.
This is one of the questions that comes up over and over.§ Beauty and the Beast was my favourite fairy tale when I was a kid, partly because it was the only one readily available to a kid growing up in the 1950s, which was not generally a hotbed of fantasy literature anyway, where the heroine did something besides wring her hands and wait to be rescued by the hero. If there is an original source for my Beauty and the Beast(s) it’s the Andrew Lang retelling which I read for the first time at about the age of six, and obsessively for years after that, even when I pretty well knew it off by heart. Since then I’ve read every version of B&B I can lay hands on, but my Beauty and the Beast is a part of me, like an arm or a leg. Or like the ground a rose-bush is planted in: I can’t do without it, it nourishes me. I used to say—truthfully—that I was jealous of readers who ‘went’ to BEAUTY as an escape from boring ordinary life, because by writing the story I’d exorcised the BEAUTY AND THE BEAST in my head. It grew back. Then I wrote ROSE DAUGHTER. This time there wasn’t any nonsense about exorcism. My Beauty and the Beast is still in the back of my mind or the bottom of my heart, full of roses and romance. If I’m very, very, very, very, very lucky I may get to write it a third time. Or a sixth or a sixtieth. Most of my stories are more or less versions of Beauty and the Beast. In the afterword to ROSE I say that someone has declared that each author has only one story, it’s how they retell it. Yes. Mine is Beauty and the Beast.
* * *
* mockorange:
I am absolutely adoring all these Mongo snippets. Clearly he is going to steal the whole book.
Thank you. Adoration is always welcome. I kind of adore Mongo myself. And he does keep getting in the way. I told you the other night that he’d just party-crashed a scene he had been specifically ordered out of. I am so glad he is not my dog. But then I don’t need to save the universe, just write about it.
** Yes. My bells woke me up this morning again. Sunday mornings are just going to be hard for a while.
*** Stranger. Lumpier.
† Although right at the moment I have a powerful desire to have a late-life career change to something easier and more suited to someone of my advanced years, like shark-wrestler or cat burglar.
†† I am going to write ALBION^ one of these days—you know, the not-a-sequel to SUNSHINE, but in the same world—and I’m not quite sure of the timeline. I’m not sure if the heroine might have heard of Sunshine and we might conceivably get some news of her that way—except it wouldn’t be reliable news, it would be myth and gossip. But myth and gossip can be pretty cool. And I’ll take what I can get.^^
^ It was next after the SINGLE VOLUME version of PEGASUS, you know. And I was looking FORWARD to it. ^%$++@}~#??£”&£”!!!!!!!!!!!!
^^ If I could impeach the frelling Story Council I so would.
††† Us authors are mostly a pretty neurotic bunch. Make a note.
§ Julia, wearing her OCD research-librarian hat, found where I’d answered the question about Aerin’s dream and Hetta from Pool in the Desert before: http://robinmckinleysblog.com/2010/11/30/further-manifestations-of-creative-reader-baked-goods-ask-robin/
What interests me is (a) it’s exactly the same question (as Julia remarks). So it has to have come from the same person. But I delete Ask Robins as I answer them, and furthermore, the one I answered a few days ago is fairly recent—certainly not from 2010. So, a mystery: did the person who sent it (since I’ve deleted it this time too I can’t check for clues) miss the answer the first time and resend it, does he/she not read the blog^ or has sodding Outlook found a brilliant new way to persecute me by suddenly coughing up new copies of years-old emails? Now there’s an awful thought. (b) I’ve got a lot crankier in the last year and a bit about Hetta and Aerin’s dream . . . because I’ve had several other people make the same assumption and can’t remember one who has said, erm, actually, that’s not Hetta in Aerin’s dream, is it? There ought to be one. As I said in my (cranky) answer the other night, I read stuff wrong in other people’s books all the time. Life is short, and when you’re reading a story for escape you aren’t paying diamond-laser attention. Which is as it should be. But there still ought to be one person who is interested enough in the question also to notice that it’s not Hetta in Aerin’s dream.
Or possibly I’m just losing my mind. This is always the best guess concerning any lapses and/or mysteries during the arduous novel-finishing phase, and especially the super-arduous novel-finishing-against-a-ghastly-deadline phase which is the (arduous) novel-finishing phase to be avoided when possible.
^ Oh . . . gods . . . or does my little copy and paste ‘read the blog’ answering email not go out for some reason?