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On editing, and what a help he is...
Aug. 20th, 2006 10:04 amOkay, so I have this book that I need to read through and make cuts therein; that's pretty much all my editor wants, other than a bit of rewriting at the end. She says, "They slog through water, they slog through more water. There is a LOT of this." I'm sure she's right. There was a lot more in the first draft, but she hasn't read that.
Anyway, I need to read this one, to find the longueurs and excise them. Now, I am a creature of habit, and I have an established pattern for this: I take the manuscript to the Lit & Phil in the morning and read it there, while in the afternoon I take it to the pub. Fine and dandy through the week, but this is the weekend. Editorial instruction reached me on Friday evening, and I do want to get it out of the way, so's I can move forward to something other.
Thing is, though, once past Saturday morning, the Lit & Phil is closed till Monday, and the pubs are hopeless at the weekend. They're full of people, damn them. So I need an alternative strategy, which involves clearing a space on my dining-table and working there.
Which involves, necessarily, Barry. I did this yesterday afternoon, and he was all over: on the page I was reading, on the pages I had read, ooh-look-I-can-sprawl-over-both-piles-at-once, on my lap... Every time I stood up and went elsewhere (more wine! more wine!) he was in my chair until I threw him off, then he was back in my hair again.
After I quit for the evening, he just settled down in the chair and didn't leave it till I went to bed. Why would he do this? It's a dining-room chair, and it's been there all year without attracting his interest hitherto; it's indistinguishable from the rest of the set except that (a) I'd been sitting in it for a couple of hours and (b) it was now in the middle of the dining-room floor (where I had heedlessly left it) rather than being tucked under the table. So I had to spend all night taking detours around it, on my way between living-room and kitchen.
And this morning he's back there again, it's his new place to be; and I should be ruthlessly throwing him off in order to get back to work, but then he'll only be in my face again, and I'll be distracted and frustrated and trying to focus on text through black furry purriness, which really doesn't work, and...
Ach, maybe I'll leave it till tomorrow. The only thing is, I have three obvious things to do at the moment - rewrite the novel, rewrite the play, read through what I've done towards the next book - and they all require the same process, so are all stymied by the same smirking purry.
Obviously, now is the time to start something new, something that actually needs writing. A short story. One of these novellae that my head is so full of. Something.
I'm going shopping.
Anyway, I need to read this one, to find the longueurs and excise them. Now, I am a creature of habit, and I have an established pattern for this: I take the manuscript to the Lit & Phil in the morning and read it there, while in the afternoon I take it to the pub. Fine and dandy through the week, but this is the weekend. Editorial instruction reached me on Friday evening, and I do want to get it out of the way, so's I can move forward to something other.
Thing is, though, once past Saturday morning, the Lit & Phil is closed till Monday, and the pubs are hopeless at the weekend. They're full of people, damn them. So I need an alternative strategy, which involves clearing a space on my dining-table and working there.
Which involves, necessarily, Barry. I did this yesterday afternoon, and he was all over: on the page I was reading, on the pages I had read, ooh-look-I-can-sprawl-over-both-piles-at-once, on my lap... Every time I stood up and went elsewhere (more wine! more wine!) he was in my chair until I threw him off, then he was back in my hair again.
After I quit for the evening, he just settled down in the chair and didn't leave it till I went to bed. Why would he do this? It's a dining-room chair, and it's been there all year without attracting his interest hitherto; it's indistinguishable from the rest of the set except that (a) I'd been sitting in it for a couple of hours and (b) it was now in the middle of the dining-room floor (where I had heedlessly left it) rather than being tucked under the table. So I had to spend all night taking detours around it, on my way between living-room and kitchen.
And this morning he's back there again, it's his new place to be; and I should be ruthlessly throwing him off in order to get back to work, but then he'll only be in my face again, and I'll be distracted and frustrated and trying to focus on text through black furry purriness, which really doesn't work, and...
Ach, maybe I'll leave it till tomorrow. The only thing is, I have three obvious things to do at the moment - rewrite the novel, rewrite the play, read through what I've done towards the next book - and they all require the same process, so are all stymied by the same smirking purry.
Obviously, now is the time to start something new, something that actually needs writing. A short story. One of these novellae that my head is so full of. Something.
I'm going shopping.