![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
desperanceActually, it's hard even to call this a draft; but it starts at a beginning and goes on to an end and then stops, so I guess.
I wouldn't ordinarily send anything away in this condition - I haven't even read the second half of it, let alone sorted out the contradictions - but it's late already, and I'm away on Sunday to Oxford and California and WFC; it would be weeks anyway before I could produce a clean draft, so editor and agent may as well have this one now and we can all kick it together.
So that's gone. For the rest of this afternoon I am reading The Retribution, which is fun, and trying to think of questions to ask Val, not that I shall need that many because, y'know. She's Val, and she makes it easy.
Also, in between chapters, I am packing bags of books. Breaking up my hardback crime section. This is (surprise!) not easy and not fun. There are books I've read and won't reread; there are books I haven't read, and probably won't. You'd think that those could just go, wouldn't you? But some of them are books by friends, or books by people who were friends ten or fifteen or twenty years ago; books by people who were friends, and are dead. Books that I think are important, whether or not I actually want or need to read them again. Books that are valuable, ditto. Books that are an utter surprise ("Wait, what? Dennis Wheatley wrote science fiction? Oh, phew - it's in the wrong section! I don't have to decide about that one today!").
So on and so forth. Some books acquire meaning beyond their story, by their simple physical presence in my life. It's kind of like old letters from people you're not in touch with any more. I'm trying to take this at a run, with a default assumption that they go unless I really can't bear to part with them - but it ain't easy, and I think I'm weakening, I think I'm slowing down.
I wouldn't ordinarily send anything away in this condition - I haven't even read the second half of it, let alone sorted out the contradictions - but it's late already, and I'm away on Sunday to Oxford and California and WFC; it would be weeks anyway before I could produce a clean draft, so editor and agent may as well have this one now and we can all kick it together.
So that's gone. For the rest of this afternoon I am reading The Retribution, which is fun, and trying to think of questions to ask Val, not that I shall need that many because, y'know. She's Val, and she makes it easy.
Also, in between chapters, I am packing bags of books. Breaking up my hardback crime section. This is (surprise!) not easy and not fun. There are books I've read and won't reread; there are books I haven't read, and probably won't. You'd think that those could just go, wouldn't you? But some of them are books by friends, or books by people who were friends ten or fifteen or twenty years ago; books by people who were friends, and are dead. Books that I think are important, whether or not I actually want or need to read them again. Books that are valuable, ditto. Books that are an utter surprise ("Wait, what? Dennis Wheatley wrote science fiction? Oh, phew - it's in the wrong section! I don't have to decide about that one today!").
So on and so forth. Some books acquire meaning beyond their story, by their simple physical presence in my life. It's kind of like old letters from people you're not in touch with any more. I'm trying to take this at a run, with a default assumption that they go unless I really can't bear to part with them - but it ain't easy, and I think I'm weakening, I think I'm slowing down.