scribbling damselfly

It's been a hectic few days weeks months, to say the least. I could sum up, but there is too much and, in the paradoxical way of these things, too little to bother. Cryptic, I know, but it is born of weariness.

The other night, being deprived of internet, I tallied up my work hours for the past little while. Turns out I've been working 90+ hour weeks for the past two months. No wonder I'm wearisome. So last night I rewarded myself with a bath, a bubble bath no less, which was a touch less restful than it might have been, owing to the cat's attempt to play with the bubbles. He didn't actually fall in, but it was a very near thing, and he's still not talking to me.

Today is my weekend from the dayjob, and, being the glutton for punishment I am, I intend to use it compiling the revision list for Pledged, so I can start in on the gamma draft for that and deliver it to the publishers sooner instead of later. I would of course prefer to rest, but if I want to eat next year, I should be virtuous. My ploy is to work slowly on two different projects, the gamma draft of Pledged and the alpha draft of the faerie novel, at the same time. That way, a change being as good as a holiday, I will get a holiday every day!

Or spontaneously implode. One or t'other.

RAINING = NO INTERNET.

STUPID TELCO DISBELIEVE.

AUTHOR CRANKY. WILL RUB TELCO REP'S FACE IN SOGGY INTERNET SIGNAL IF THAT'S WHAT IT TAKES.

ALL COMMS BY BATSIGNAL UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE.

(SAVE ME.)

Right, yes, hello…where were we?

There is a stack of paper 400+ pages thick sitting beside me, otherwise known as the copyedited manuscript, which I am tentatively calling done. Barring acts of random deities, genius ideas at two am, a plague of mice ravenous for a meal entirely of paper, or what-have-you, this stack of paper will be going in the post … er, soon. I missed today's post, and am flying to Melbourne for the day tomorrow for dayjob purposes. What do you think? Is it worth the agony of carting the stack on the plane and finding a post office in Melbourne, or do I attempt to make it to the post office on Thursday, in between knocking off work and closing time? Dilemmas, dilemmas.

The malware issue is not fixed, precisely, but I have narrowed in on the issue. I have found the registry key which was changed, but I may or may not have found whatever snippet of code did the changing. Just in case I didn't find it, I have set the firewall to be extra-vigilant at monitoring that set of registry keys. At any rate, I have not been plagued by hijacked websites for a whole day, which is promising. And a relief, because I was very, very close to reformatting the hard drive and resorting to a clean install.

There are probably other things, but I am quite braindead right now. So instead, have a photo:

I took this snap on my walk in to work about a month ago now. It had been raining and drizzling for over a week, and the colour in the sky as the sun cleared the hills was breathtaking.

I'm having a bit of a troubled run at the moment, with malware or possibly worse invading the computers and frazzling my concentration, not to mention making internet access patchy at best.

I think I have the problem stamped out on the laptop at least (fingers crossed), which means I've been able to resume progress on the copyedit, although knowing there's malicious code lurking unhunted and unpunished on the desktop is gnawing at me.

If I'm quiet in the next couple of days, it's because I'm copyediting and stalking down binary bugs. Back soon. (If I'm not, it's because I've fallen before the onslaught. Run. Save yourselves.)

The Pope, the evening news tells me, loved the koala. This is not particularly surprising — everybody loves the koalas.

I have finished the small stuff on the copyedits, and have only the big-fix pass to go. This, of course, is the slower and more frustrating pass, as it forces me to dig ever deeper in an attempt to fix something that was already, last time I saw it, the best I thought I could do. Once more into the breach!

(Also, the fact that I have used the word "fix" twice in the past paragraph is itching at me. Clearly, my copyeditor is having an influence on me.)

In utterly trivial news, my aunt has a cat who routinely stares at the wall. She parks herself facing the wall and ignoring all others in the room. Apparently she can do this for hours. It's her way of coping, now that she's not on the kitty equivalent of valium. It's a concept guaranteed to make me giggle, quite frankly.

The copyedits slog on, and the further I wade in, the more notes I leave myself of the "yeah, come back and fix this, definitely" nature. This is the part of the process where I start to despair because I seem to be making more notes to self than I'm fixing. The mindset is entirely untrue and entirely transitory, of course. The only cure is to keep on keeping on, until the manuscript is finished. Such is (this) writer's life.

Today, just to prove that parking yourself in front of a computer for hours on end can be a dangerous and tricky affair, I discovered a tick biting me. A tick! This is because the cat, now he's all grown up and thinks he's smart enough, insists on venturing outside on a daily basis. Which would be fine, except he likes to visit the enormous snarl of obviously tick-infested lantana choking the gully behind the house.

I have also, of late, been experimenting with that most infamous of social network sites, facebook. Is it the most evil site ever created, or not? All these websites with "friends" networks, people who are allowed in and people who are not, irrelevant snippets of information about what your "friends" have recently been doing in terms of what applications they've added or what utterly illogical quizzes they've taken, trivialising social interaction.

Or maybe that's just me.

Don't mind me if I go a little silent over the next couple of days: it's my weekend, and I want to fix words while the dayjob is out of mind.

Successfully caught up, and am now ahead of target by 14 pages. Not as much as I'd hoped, but I am sluggish due to oxygen deprivation today, what with fighting off a lurgy. I have taken to drinking Benadryl by the tablespoon, not that it helps much.

Today I learnt that I have been spelling carcass wrong, probably all my life. Apparently the British spelling, and therefore the version I as an Australian should use, is carcase. News to me.

In other news, hearts are tricksome things, and not to be trusted. That is all.

83 and a bit pages down, 329 and a bit pages to go. The mathematically-inclined among you will note I am already behind on my 50-a-day metric, but I'm not too worried (yet), as I'm pretty sure I can catch up. That's the plan for tomorrow, actually: finish catching up. I'm not at the dayjob tomorrow, so it should be manageable.

So far, the copyedit, although thorough, is nowhere near as tricksome as the structural edit was. Mind you, I've been skipping the big-fix stuff for later, when I've fixed all the small stuff, so it's possible I might change my mind on that issue in a few days' time.

There has been STETting. It's kinda fun. Writers is nuts, truly.

It's strange what you learn when someone with an eagle eye goes over your manuscript. Today I learnt that I apparently have no preference as to whether I spell it "dispatch" or "despatch" but happily bounce back and forth between the two.

I've also decided it is much, much nicer to edit on paper rather than on screen.

The copyedit (no, really this time) has landed. Oof. Not having had a novel published before, I have no scale against which to gauge the copyeditor's report, but let's just say that when my editor kept repeating the copyeditor had been "very thorough", she wasn't lying. If there's a continuity issue or inconsistency my copyeditor missed, I'll be very, very surprised.

Which is all to the good because, as my Clarion class can attest, my stories are built upon continuity errors and inconsistencies, most often to their detriment. It's a feature, I tell you!

So far all I've done tonight is calculate that I'll need to get through about 50 pages a day in order to knock this over before the latest-possible deadline. That will give me a couple of days spare at the end to tackle any bigger issues, and a couple of days to get the manuscript back via the post (which, you guessed it, arrived today, two days after it was sent, despite the "overnight" guarantee — methinks postal service providers in Australia never were all that good at maths).

Guess I'd better get started, eh?

Today I saw the following sign at the train station:

Try the new 14 Day RailPass. It's like the 7 Day RailPass, but lasts twice as long.

No shit, Sherlock.

I examined the other commuters, wondering if they were as idiotic as the advertising implied. Surely they did not need such a simple concept explained to them in four-foot letters. They didn't look particularly stupid, although I have to admit, none of them gaped at the sign and choked on their own amusement and dismay at the human race the way I did. Maybe they'd seen it before. Was it then the advertisers, either RailCorp or the marketing specialists, who assumed the commuters truly were that phenomenally stupid?

Either way, I am left bemused and befuddled and a little bit more jaded.

Today, I arrived home to an email from my editor, telling me the copyedit would be returning back to me for a second pass, a final pass, early next week. (Because what I'd been calling the copyedit, prior to this, was in fact some other edit, let's call it a structural edit. Rookie mistake.) I clicked quickly past that email, only to arrive at another telling me the copyedit was in fact returning tomorrow.

I am very, very, stupidly, enthusiastically and ludicrously excited to see this book published — but at the same time, I am near to exhaustion at the thought of trawling through this sucker AGAIN.

You will know when your novel is finished. You will feel like throwing up whenever you look at it.James Frey, "How To Write a Damn Good Novel"

Substitute "think of" for "look at" and that's pretty much spot on.

Still, this is a very exciting part of the process — this is the part where I get to write STET! over the manuscript. I've never STETted before.

I am looking forward to that part