So, it's probably a touch mean of me to tease you all with a wordle of Shadow Bound, since it won't be published and available to read until much closer to the middle of the year.
But I'm going to do precisely that.
Gee, can you guess which two characters get mentioned an awful lot?
Today I bring you: a title!
Book 2 of The Binding — which I have previously been referring to by such monikers as Book 2, Pledged, the rest of Matilde's story, and "that effing car-crash of a narrative" (you know, when I'm feeling particularly affectionate) — shall henceforth be known as Shadow Bound.
I'm very happy with it, and not only because pretty much every title I could think of with Queen in it started to sound dreadfully, er, steamy. So going with Shadow for the linking element? Good thing. (Titles. They're hard.)
In other news, today, in stopping to let me board, the tram stopped directly under the insulated point, and couldn't start again. The driver tried all sorts of strange and mystical things like peering at the roof, adjusting the side-view mirrors, sitting down so heavily in his seat that he rocked the tram (not enough), and even jumping in his cabin to rock the tram (not enough). After all his efforts failed … we had to get out and push. PUSHING TRAMS. I have never heard of such shenanigans.
Makes for a good story, though, there is that.
Lookit!
Just as I was saying that I was coming to the end of the deadline crunch, and thinking about how glorious it would be to read new stuff, I caught up with a friend for dinner the other night and she leant me:
BOOKS! (All my friends are enablers of the worst best kind.)
It is all part of her ploy to bring me to the YA scene, because I happened to express my love for the voice in YA books — if you're looking for whippy narrative tone, with sarcasm and cleverness and sly internal observation all wrapped around blunt honesty, YA is where it's at — and now she has given me homework. The best kind of homework ever.
Naturally, I started reading them on the tram on the way home. There was, after all, a solitary tram ride to be endured, and, well. It goes without saying, doesn't it? This was not the wisest weakness I've ever indulged, because at that point I had STILL not finished the edits1 — but tonight, not half an hour ago,2 that last is no longer true. Edits are done, the corrected manuscript has been mailed to my editor and agent and is therefore officially off my desk, and I am free to enjoy my all-new all-YA reading feast guilt-free.
My Goodreads page shows me as being in the middle of a modest slew of books, which is not untrue: they're all books I've started and not yet finished.1 But whenever my workload gets intense, I have this habit of returning to familiar ground, reading-wise.
So lately I've been re-reading, and my books of choice for this Christmas are Jane Austen's — Pride & Prejudice and Persuasion to be precise. I never can tell which of the two I like best, and whenever I read one I inevitably read the other within a month.
This time, I'm going to follow that up with a little Pride & Prejudice & Zombies, which was one of my Christmas presents, just as soon as I finish the edits. Which may be too much Austen and Austen-imitation even for my taste, but what the hell. I'm up for it!
Ugh.
For the past … week? has it only been a week? … I've been pulling in 15-16 hour days, between the dayjob and the edits, and the few hours left over afterwards are for scarfing down some trans-fats and/or melted cheese, commuting, and nowhere near enough sleep. I tell you, I am not built for this sort of routine.
My favourite manuscript pages in this whole process were the act breaks. Do you know what they are? FREEBIE PAGES. (I'm gonna write manuscripts with fifty-gazllion acts in future, just so I can have lots of lovely, do-nothing-to-me freebie pages.)
Luckily, as of today I've all but finished the edits on Pledged. The first pass to take care of the line-edit stuff is done, the tags I stuck throughout the manuscript to mark bigger fixes have all been taken care of, the edit letter with its structural problems has been ticked off. I even made a little "It followed me home! Can I keep it?" note in the margin over that made-up word 
Now the only thing left to do is a final sweep for repetition.1 Which is none too soon, really, because the pressure's on at the dayjob and I could really do with a just a smidge more sleep. Like, you know, a decade or so.
One thing I did manage to do in the past few weeks was go to the movies, wherein I was treated to a trailer for Clash Of The Titans. The tagline of which, in a stroke of utter lunacy, is: TITANS WILL CLASH.
To which I say: tagline writers, you have just committed a tautological crime against humanity. STOP THAT.
Not dead.
Editing.
Send alcohol. Or cabana boys. Or a TARDIS — time. I need more of it, STAT!
Well! Christmas — and 2009 — is officially over and done with. I won't say I've emerged entirely unscathed, but I and my family appear to have the correct number of functioning limbs and vital organs apiece, and my incipient lunacy has progressed slower than anticipated.
I'm counting it as a win.
Mostly, in between brief bouts with my family and decidedly less brief bouts of flying,1 I spent my Christmas editing. (Oh yeah, I know how to party. Just ask me.) Sometimes, my family helped with the editing. Like the one time I really wanted someone to say that blood did not taste all that metallic, and not one of them would. After that, since they took such glee in ganging up on me, I asked them "Well, what tastes like iron, that isn't blood, and isn't iron?"
Their suggestions included blood sausage, cranberries, and Deep Heat. None of which, you know, make for great similes.
I've made a first pass through every page of the manuscript, so all the little fixes should be taken care of and only the fiddly larger fixes remain. Oh joy. My all-time favourite blooper in the manuscript was when the character Xaver suddenly and inexplicably, for one line only, became Xander. WTF? My all-time favourite editor's note in the margin of the manuscript was this one:
a nice word – but not a real one??
Obviously my editor is a woman after my mother's heart, who is convinced I am engaged in a single-handed attempt to pervert English by (gasp) making up new words.
And now, after all the editing I've done this weekend, I think it's time for pizza. Or oblivion. I can't decide.
First, the administrivia: I have been a most efficient and dedicated authorly creature and mailed out the giveaway books. They went out in the afternoon post of Monday 21 December (my time). So, winners, eyes on your mail boxes, and please to be ooh'ing and aah'ing over the pretty when it arrives, 'kay? 'kay.
I would like to say that my Christmas has been quiet and contemplative, but as I steal a moment to write this I quite literally cannot hear anything over the bawling and hollering of the two year old and three year old. They're not a patch on the twenty-four year old cousin egging them on, however. I can say my Christmas has been raucously festive, at least 
It's also involved edits. Lots of. I'm now about halfway through the first pass of edits on Pledged Book 2, whatever it ends up being called. But as I go through, I stick a post-it note against any fix that requires too much thinking or might result in a ripple of changes back and/or forward through the novel. So the pages I've 'done' usually end up with a minimum 3 post-it notes apiece, and need to be gone back to. They're starting to look like much harder work than the pages I haven't touched yet. Oy vey.
Somewhere along the line I realised I've started talking to the edits. Well, actually, that usually happens from the get-go — but I seem to have progressed to talking aloud to the edits. Can't remember at what point I started talking aloud to the edits of Shadow Queen, so hard to say whether my insanity is progressing faster or not. Probably faster. Accelerated by the Christmas lights, no doubt.
I had more to say, but the squalling has reached epic proportions and if I don't at least make an effort to intervene, I might end up caught in the crossfire. See you all in the new year!
So you know what I did, carrying that decidedly not-large-by-fantasy-novel-standards manuscript home on Monday?
Yup: I wrenched my back, bad enough to spend the next day rather sparky and blurry-eyed courtesy of nurofen. Writing! It's DANGEROUS, people.
Thanks to christmas shenanigans courtesy of the dayjob, I haven't managed to spend as much time as I'd like on the edits this week.1 But I did have to laugh at one comment in the edit letter proper.
Those of you who remember the edits of Shadow Queen will remember that the manuscript I handed in had 10(ish) chapters, and the final published book had over 30 — because with every pass my editor kept patiently requesting "Shorter chapters, please. No, shorter still!"
Well, it appears I learned my lesson rather too well, because the edit letter for Pledged has a note that some of the chapters shouldn't be chapters at all and should be run on to the end of the previous chapter. And in looking through I discovered the manuscript I handed in had over 50 chapters.
Yeah. I run to extremes.
The only other "fun" facts to come out of the edits so far is that my characters are apparently (just a touch) too fond of glancing, looking, gazing, and even occasionally various rarer permutations thereof. Apparently my characters were engaged in some kind of staring competition while I was off busily trying to concoct a plot. Damn them, anyway.
I've just come from catching up with my A&U editor, who said so many lovely things about my writing that my ego is currently too large to fit inside my rather humble apartment and is consequently perched on the rooftop throwing stones at passersby and singing bawdy songs at the top of its metaphorical lungs. Everybody should have the chance to work with such lovely people is all I can say.
Of course, I'm sure I'll be gnashing my teeth over all the squiggly, niggly, consequence-altering changes I'll need to wrangle into submission by the end of the edits. Not to mention all the stupid little writerly habits that plague me. Exhibit A:
first page of the manuscript and already a reminder to avoid repetition of words - oops!
I have been so astoundingly successful in not thinking about Pledged that I have genuinely forgotten everything and anything that happens in the manuscript,1 and thus I managed to inspire no small suspicion in my editor that I was simply pretending to be Deborah Kalin and had the real author locked up in a basement somewhere. Er, oops. Still, can't accuse me of not doing my best to come at these edits "fresh"!
One thing I was sorta refusing to think about was how the ending of Pledged would be received. Because I love the ending, love it in a hill-I'll-die-on kind of way, and I so wanted my editor to love it as much as I did, and what if she didn't…?
But look!2
BOOYAH
© 2005 - 2010 Deborah Kalin