All the time someone is reading my work, I'm anxious. I get more anxious as the time goes on. Maybe they can't think of a nice way to tell me it's bad, I think. Maybe I've completely lost it and handed in the worse book in history. Was it even English? I do it every time. Alternatively, maybe they haven't had time to read it yet. Maybe they haven't had time to write me an email full of useful feedback. They probably have a million other things to do.
But it isn't just that that is stressing me out. Dodger, my ginger cat, who is part teddy bear and is my constant writing companion, is in the vet hospital. He stopped eating last weekend, and was diagnosed with jaundice on Monday. Four days on a drip with antibiotics and steroids haven't brought any improvement so I think everyone is agreed that, unless he is much better by morning, his time is up. He's fourteen, it's not a shock and yet...I can't bear it. Every now and then a wave of grief overwhelms me. In between, I'm sane and sensible, but then... I'm just hoping for it to pass once Dodger is gone.
So this is a sad me, not writing, not cuddling my cat, just waiting to feel better.
I've been invited to contribute to the Mslexia blog, for three months from August. This is nicely over the deadline for the Mslexia novel competition (write, ladies, write!) and my own book launch. This feels like a wonderful development to me. A great platform from which to introduce my book to the world, and say to a lot of writer women, if I can do it, maybe you can too. It gets lonely and frustrating out there, writing, wondering if anyone will ever read the words we wrestle with.
Which means, it's time for another plug for the competition that gave me an agent and a book deal. How rare are opportunities like this? Your book will get a proper look from people who know about good writing. The prize is £5000 for the winner but the extras are worth far more. The top three will get feedback from the Literary Consultancy, and the shortlisted authors will get to meet agents and editors at a special event in London.
Not to mention that even to be longlisted is something in your query letter. You do have to be female, and writing for adults or YA (not children) and have a book of 50,000 words at least, ready to send off if you are longlisted. It's £25. That's a return for me of...priceless. You can be from anywhere, but write in English, and you can't be published commercially, but that's it. No preferred genre. Mine is urban fantasy and while I hope it's well written, it's not what I think of as literary. Go for it. I dare you.
I'm just finishing up the proof read of The Secrets of Life and Death, and it's been a humbling experience. Despite countless reads and edits, a lot of silly mistakes, mainly repetitions, have slipped through. And stray commas. And odd spaces and reversed speech marks. Some of them I probably created during the copy edit. I'm marking them all up and putting them into a note to go to the publishers, but I'm embarrassed by the sheer number. I'm also blushing at the fact that I can't spell 'embarrassed', thank goodness for the spell check.
I've been fairly astonished at the process of tidying up a novel. A bit like pregnancy, you focus on the birth and distracted from all the work and emotional madness that follows. Getting a book deal was a lot of work for my agent but I just sat around and daydreamed about what it would be like. Then edits, and changes, and more edits, and discussions about the cover. More edits, more polishing...it has taken a lot of work to get it this far, and we still have proof copies to look at. I have a lot more respect for the process now, it's hard to get a tidy copy of your book out there. I can't remember the last time I read a book and didn't find a mistake so I'm dreading opening the book straight to one...hopefully not.
The weather here is stormy, the wind's getting up, the sun is mostly out but clouds are scudding across from the west and my writing seems strangely influenced by the atmosphere. On rainy days I'm more likely to write moody, dark forest scenes or indoor chapters. On frosty, snowy or cold days sunshine sneaks into my writing, and warm days definitely lighten the mood on the page. I can read a first scruffy draft and often guess what the weather was like at the time...not very helpful when you write a scene over several days! But today it's cheered me up. The chickens keep getting their skirts blown up and are clucking and skipping around the yard. They prefer that to being stuck in the run, but I'll get them in if it rains. Odd gusts give them all punk hair, though.
I have a love/hate relationship with the wildlife around here. Squirrels entertain us with battles over the bird feeder but will eat all my sweetcorn, badgers that enchant us by eating dried fruit and dog biscuits off the front step, but dig up my seedlings. The onion and garlic bed planted last year now has baby onions coming up all over the place as they get dug up and replanted. I'm amazed they survive. But I wouldn't swap it. I know having such a huge house (it is silly big but there were seven of us) for a diminishing family is a bit daft, but they will all be home in the summer and I can pretend that we couldn't possibly move down to a smaller house. But in September no. 5 child goes off to university and it will just be us and the fourteen year old.
I've got the proof pages of The Secrets of Life and Death to work through, and it's slow going. I've managed 60 pages - before my brain went numb - reading every word out loud and looking for tiny errors. Spaces in front of dialogue, a couple of those. A couple of commas perhaps I shouldn't have taken out, an 'of' instead of 'on'. I can't believe that the many many edits haven't found these tiny snags, that I could have read them wrong so many times. I know there will be some in the finished document. Ouch.
Worse, today I seem to have my 'literary' hat on. Normally I just rush through telling my story, and don't worry too much about whether I have written well, but today I am wincing at all the odd phrases, accidental alliterations, things that could have been worded better. I know this is my shop window, this is the book that will be out there on its own for a long time as the only available example of my writing, and it's not my best work because I have learned so much over the last eighteen months.
Meanwhile book 2 is having its first read through, by my agent, who will hopefully gently point me in the direction of the major snags and highlight what works and what doesn't. I feel rushed at the moment, perhaps I will ask for more time to really finish book 2. It isn't going out until June 2014. Having said that, I always think that.
On a different subject, the building work and decoration over in my new bedroom, we took delivery of my new bed. We ordered it in the Christmas sales and it's finally here, so I may unwind with a quick bounce on my new mattress - immature but there you go. I've had a really busy day.
It's been a great day for me. It's Beltane, the Celtic festival opposite Halloween on the calendar, and it's our ninth wedding anniversary. I finished the complete, finished draft of book 2, all edited and gaps filled in etc. and it was sunny all day. Then my pages came from the publisher's, ready for me to put the final tidy up and gloss on book 1. I sent book 1 off to the competition on Halloween and book 2 is going off in Beltane, seems appropriate for a series rooted in magic and sorcery!
So we celebrated with a bag of chips on the sea front, eaten out of the wrapper eyed up by increasingly bold and bossy seagulls. I got some lovely flowers, we walked hand in hand to a restaurant and had a lovely meal, we laughed and joked about the book in the euphoria that comes with finishing a huge project, and we are about to enjoy an evening in front of the fire. Well deserved, I think, because the last few weeks have been hard work, had some unpleasant surprises in and generally have felt heavy.
Tomorrow it's back to work as usual - I have about twenty epigraphs to write, some of them complicated and they will need research. I have to edit the new stuff I wrote today, including the ending, and I have to put together three book outlines for my agent to look at ahead of meeting up with her later in May. All good stuff, though, I can't wait to get stuck in.
Here are my flowers and the proof pages, ready for my perusal!
I seem to have two speeds. One is flat out writing ninja, editing twenty thousand words a day, hair on fire kind of speed. The other is writing tortoise, dead slow, cutting then restoring snippets, fussing over tiny research details that I got right the first time, endlessly checking tiny details like formatting of chapter headings (which will get done at a later date anyway). On Tuesday evening we had a family emergency and I went from writing ninja to tortoise in seconds. Wednesday I had time set aside to work but it was like dancing in glue, blindfolded. Thursday I could have easily worked for a few hours but no, glue-dancing tortoise again. Today I woke up early, threw myself at the computer and edited twenty-two thousand words with deft efficiency, cutting out about three thousand saggy middle words as I went. Go figure, I certainly can't make myself do it, it just happens. This makes time management very difficult.
Other stuff is happening too. Silly things like my new bed arriving next Thursday, to go with the posh, newly en-suited, plastered and decorated bedroom. The garden is full of plants throwing flowers up and the birds are behaving in an unseemly manner all over the garden then singing about it. I even caught the squirrels making baby squirrels this morning. It's quite difficult to throw my imagination back four hundred years and write about a frosty night in March 1587...
I have also managed to enjoy an intriguing book that almost, but didn't quite, keep me riveted. Amity and Sorrow by Peggy Riley was clever, full of interesting characters and well written.
The premise caught me straight away, a story of a woman escaping from a polygamous cult when she realises her "husband" is abusing her daughter. The daughters, Amity and Sorrow are well drawn, and the mother Amaranth is well written and engaging. But bits of the story weren't as well realised as I had hoped, and the book could have been longer to follow Amity's progression as well as Sorrow's. There's little movement in either the historical story of life in the cult, nor of the present day post-cult. But I'm nitpicking, it's a very entertaining read, just not a great one.
I've set myself a week (unrealistically, possibly) to finish the book. I managed, from a less promising place, to finish the last book for the competition in less than three days, and this time I'm allowing myself to sleep regular hours. I'm at 30k of edited words, and some of the later chapters don't need a lot of work (and some really do need significant rewriting). I reckon I've got about four or possibly five chapters to actually write and some of the later chapters are a bit sparse and thin. I tend to throw away the big action chapters in a sort of emotional shorthand (I write them fast because the action is racing in my head) so I need to go back and linger a bit on the details.
Book 1 is off to a typesetter (I'm so excited, even though I don't really know what that means) and a proofreader and then I get sent the printed pages to look for errors and typos that have survived repeated edits. So far everything's been in emails and Word files have been zipping backwards and forwards. Back to paper... Mind you, I see things on the printed page that I would completely miss on the screen, that's why I print copies off in Lulu to catch odd mistakes and repeated words.
This rewrite etc. would go a lot faster if I didn't start writing the blog, I suppose...displacement activity. It's like having a deadline for a 100k word assignment, but with less critical tutors...
