Narrative irony. Now visiting a subconscious somewhere near you.

So I dreamed that I was checking into a hotel, and the clerk saw my surname and jokingly asked if I lived in Newcastle, in England. So I said yes, actually, and he asked if I knew this other guy with my name, Chaz Brenchley. And I said actually I am Chaz Brenchley, and he turned out to be my Greatest Fan Ever, he had all my books and thought I was an undeclared genius, and told his fellow-clerk all about me, and and and.

And then there was a civil war, and he shot me dead. And lamented beautifully over my corpse, of course.

Search and destroy. Replace. Whatever.

This morning I am being frighteningly organisational. I am applying Book View Cafe standards and formats to my reconstructed manuscript version of Dispossession (A Farewell To Tabs, inter alia: apparently none of the cool kids use the tab key any more, their computers apply such things automagically? *shrugs* I am a dinosaur; if I want an indent, I hit tab). This involves, inevitably, a whole lot of Search and Replace - 4,320 apostrophes to be smartened up, 3,216 stupid quotes, and so forth - all of which is surprising me by how long it's taking. I swear my last computer was not this slow at the same task, tho' this one has more memory and a faster processor. *shrugs again*

So during the longueurs, I keep ducking out to the kitchen and sorting the store cupboard. There are no more spices in packets; everything is labelled and containerised. (Further to my last, re labelling: I don't use Hindi spice-words, I use my own native English tongue - except, apparently, for amchoor. It's that or "Sour Green Dried Mango Powder": or in other words, we don't have a word for it and they do, so. Also, I always have to stop to remember that it's sour green dried mango powder; it's amchoor. *shrugs one more time*) (Also, Indian bay leaves: not bay leaves. Completely different tree. Cassia, as it happens, the bark of which is not cinnamon but never mind. Apparently we still call them bay leaves, so.)

The cupboard in which my spices are? Is exactly two millimetres too narrow for my brilliant system to operate at peak efficiency. But that's okay, it was never going to be very efficient anyway. *refuses to shrug yet again*

Also there has been a quantity of trekking back and forth, crying "Sweetie? What is this...?" Answers so far have included "It's a Babylon 5 prop; don't throw it away!" and "I don't know, I think it was a present; open it and see." (It was a Caesar salad pasta mix. I know what each of those words means.)

Okay. I have reformatted and changed font; I have deleted tabs and ensmarteneded quotes and apostrophes and dashes too. I still need to recast chapter titles, insert separators and replace underlines with italics, but I'll do those on the hoof, as I, y'know. Read the thing. It's been eighteen years, I can't hardly remember anything about it. 'Cept for Luke. You can't forget Luke. (Please to see icon, for Luke.)

Cut short

Also, we have trimmed Barry's front claws. It took two sessions, but he was oddly patient about it all. I am now in hopes that he will no longer click on the hardwood floors, nor stick to the carpet.

The dating game

Most of the time you don't notice, because the last thing you want to do is reread your own fiction; but every now and then you have to, when a new edition looms, and if your fiction ever was contemporary, it can slap you in the face how fast books date, and how many ways there are to date them.

I was on the verge of making this a question, of going to the internet for advice, whether I should update as I go to keep Dispossession the contemporary urban fantasy it was meant to be, make it contemporary again when it was written nearly twenty years ago; I was going to offer an example - it speaks of the Five Nations, I was going to say, ought I to make that the Six Nations, so that people who follow rugby football don't trip over an archaism and so fall out of the story? - only then I remembered that if I updated the reference, then to be consistent I'd need to update a hell of a lot more. I'd need to introduce the internet, eg. And mobile phones, no doubt. And one way or another the plot would surely fall on its face, because why didn't they just...? is a question that seems more and more obvious to readers, and becomes harder and harder for a writer to address, as you pull a book further and further from the mind-set and the milieu in which it was created.

And no, I don't want radically to rewrite it; so no, I shall not update. It is a historical novel now. Some of you were barely even born, good grief.