Paksworld

So, I ship the combed, braided, polished manuscript back to my editor,  and after a few hours to breathe deeply, look at flowers, avoid rattlesnakes (unlike yesterday)  I open the book I was working on before the editor’s comments came.

“Hi,” I said to it, as I came in.   “I’m back!  Ready to go?”

Silence.   This is the thing about books in progress.    Mine at least.  They hate being  interrupted.    I apologized.  I reminded the story that it had been warned I needed to leave for awhile, and that I was now back, as promised.

Silence.   The book did not even deign to answer me, or look at me.  It stared out the window.   “Come on now,” I coaxed, flipping through its files.  “Here’s a nice place to start in again–”   It turned away even more.  It was not mollified.   It was not resigned.  It was furious at what it perceived as abandonment.   It snarled at me mentally that I had promised, after the two novellas last year, that I would not do anything else.

I argued that doing revisions on its first part was not the same thing as going off and writing space opera.  It sniffed.   A book in first draft regards revision as something that happens someday, a long way away, to someone else.   It reminded me that I’m leaving for six days and just exactly how much writing will I do during that time?   “None, if you don’t straighten up,” I said, unwisely.   One coaxes books out of their sulks–threatening them doesn’t work (well, not unless the deadline is approaching at the speed of light.)

So there is Book, attempting to claim that it doesn’t want to be written (by YOU, it mutters),   and here am I, wanting to do some writing that isn’t the hideously nitpicky word-by-word snipping I’ve been doing.   Luckily, I know from several decades of this stuff that Book will come around.    We’re too far into this project for Book to quit on me…but it wants to be sure I understand its position.  (I do, already: just come on and let’s get going.  We’ll all be happier after a good thousand-word-plus gallop.)

Book and I will have to have a mind-body experience tonight–I will have to sit here until Book deigns to let me write it, which means the body will be stiff and tired, but the mind will suddenly connect with Book.   And I had better take the laptop (or a big fat notebook)  on the train with me.

[Edited 4/28, because I got home and found, of all things, an apostrophe error!   ICK!  Bad writer: no cookie!]