One way to start a day

I don't often post about my dreams, on account of finding other people's dreams really rather dull as a rule; they're only charming, I think, to those who figure in them.

However. This morning I dreamed that Geoff Ryman phoned me up to talk about the problems with the story he was buying from me, the rewrites that he wanted. Which were ... extensive. It was a baseball story, see, and he wanted it to speak to American patriotism, and like that...

It was something of a relief to wake up and remember that while Geoff does indeed owe me an edit letter on a story, it is not about baseball and need not speak to any such subject matter.

That was really the best moment of my morning. I am filled altogether with a disinclination to work, especially to go back to the new novel for a second pass: which is of course the one thing that I must do. I'm off to the Lit & Phil with it, any moment now, honest I am. But my head hurts already.

To brighten your day, on the other hand, I offer you evidence that Barry has a new favourite perch, from which he may supervise my working:

My yarli. Which Barry sits upon.

People are asking, so allow me to explain:

There is a place called Knaresborough in darkest Yorkshire, which used to host one of the most interesting galleries in the country. The way it worked - I understand - is that the guy who owned it had made pots of money in the City, and now passed his time in travelling. And wherever he travelled - Africa, India, China - he bought stuff that he liked, and sent it back. You might find the gallery full of Vietnamese lacquerware, or African tribal games, or Cantonese furniture. Anything, really, but it was always lovely. And expensive. I used to pine.

Backstage, though, behind the gallery was a great barn where they stored whatever hadn't sold out front. That was a treasure trove to poke around in. And one day, poking, I found my yarli.

Click him to embiggen:



He is the head of a temple lion from southern India; he might (I am told) have sat on the steps of the temple, or else he might have been part of a juggernaut and dragged around the city streets. He is, perhaps, eighteenth century. He has traces of paint remaining, but very few; and he is delightfully, deliciously rotten. One eye is gone, and his hairy fringes; his iron teeth survive. His back is like balsa wood, it crumbles at a touch.

Which is, of course, why Barry should not sit on him. Ahem.

A thousand visions and revisions

It's not that I dislike revisions, exactly. I have - I have said it before - the soul of a copy-editor; I am a quibbler, pedantic and exact. On the page, at least. I'm a lot sloppier in the sloppy, soppy flesh.

I do enjoy the intense engagement with a text that is more or less the definition of revision. The trouble is, when it's my own, I wind up hating the text: bored by some sections, appalled by others, finding very little of merit anywhere within it.

I think it's only about over-exposure. I've been blithely describing this as the second pass, but what does that mean, exactly? It starts by discounting the actual original writing, the first engagement with the text, where I run every sentence through my head a dozen times before I type it, and then as like as not delete and retype it a dozen more; we don't count that at all.

The first pass is what happens between my reaching the end of that original draft, and sending it out to my agents: but that is - at least - twice more through it, once on paper and once on screen. Only actually it's many more times than that, because each sentence gets read and reread on paper, scribbled on and rewritten, and then read and reread on screen before the scribbles are considered and reconsidered. Lord alone knows how many times I've actually thought about each word in the manuscript, before it leaves my hands.

And then the agents have their comments, and I do it all again - in two stages again, yes - before it goes to my editor. This time through I'm ringing the changes, by alternating work on the manuscript with work on the computer, rather than going all the way through it once and then again; this morning and this afternoon I worked on paper in town, and this evening I am transferring yesterday's paperwork to the screen. And trying only to revisit those bits that I have actually scribbled on, rather than reading the whole thing over. And failing, of course. And, yup, not so very far from hating this text already; and I still have editor's revisions to make, and then the copy-edit, and then the proofs.