scribbling damselfly

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.

1. which, between time constraints and wacky hijinks involving the Accept All Changes button while miles from the latest backed up copy, were, yeah, dragging on a bit… [↩]
2. I have spent the intervening half-hour looking for icons of Mr Earbrass, or images that could be made into icons of Mr Earbrass, but to no avail, alas alack [↩]

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!

1. I never used to read multiple books at any given time. But things change. [↩]

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.

1. I tell you, if one of my characters looks, glances, gazes, stares, glares, or fixes their eyes on something ever again, it'll be too damn soon. [↩]

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.

1. Three out of five of my flights were heinously delayed, courtesy of Brisbane Airport — even when I was nowhere near the place! Damn flow-on effects and low-budget airlines not having any spare planes, anyway. [↩]