Paksworld

You know you’re in trouble with Book when you return to it after an absence which it seemed to accept, and it plunges you into a snowstorm, then gallops off, bit in teeth.

Of course it’s my fault–we know that.   But I’ve been making sporadic, and increasingly frantic, efforts to get back to Book, with interruptions you’d have to be another writer to believe.     I just realized that writers’ visual acuity, when it comes to deadlines, is peculiar.   When I agreed to a) the first email interview, and b) the second email interview, and c) the short article, and a couple of student email interviews about a reading assignment…each one of these, seen through the reversed telescope of a distant deadline (6 weeks off, then)  seemed a mere speck beside the BIG deadline (for the manuscript’s revisions and the map.)

Oh, sure, ten minutes for this, and an hour for that, and probably 20 minutes, and…of course, these little things wouldn’t be any trouble at all…

At some point (probably unique to each writer) the telescope turns over and the comfortably distant deadline with its teeny-tiny little jobs-to-be-done is suddenly right there in your face with every whisker and every bared fang in 3-D living color.    So for me, the telescope turned last week.  I had sent off the revised ms. of Oath of Fealty and was deep into the map project, with some success.  Got the interviews done, except for the one that came limping in yesterday (did that last night).  But the map project developed some unexpected kinks, and the short article–which should’ve been fast and straightforward (and for which a first draft was done) went into mule mode for one paragraph.  A critical paragraph.  A paragraph that is getting worse as I try to revise it.

And last night when I got home from fencing…a big fat wodge of page proofs was on the kitchen chair, from a long-ago project now being issued as an omnibus.  That’s two books’ worth of pages, in other words, that the publisher wants back “by ASAP.”    Page proofs require the microscopic mind–the nitpicking mind–and that’s inimical to drafting articles (or blog entries, for that matter) or of course Book.    In map-drawing, the nitpicking mind yammers in the background that this isn’t the same as the original map and makes my hand shake more than the wiggles of a river need.

Triage is necessary.  The books in page proofs can survive without me; the map and article on deadline can’t.  So they have to come first.   Then as fast as I can, I’ll do the page proofs (while Book fumes in the background, stamping an impatient hoof) and then hopefully have a month without interruption until the copyedit of Oath comes back at the end of June.   I have in inkling of what’s in the snowstorm, but Book is going to make me work for it, that’s clear.   I want to know.  I want to know who does what to whom, and how, and if the big climax I want (as writer and reader) is the one we’re going to get, or if it’s something else.

And I’m desperate to get outside to the land (where I haven’t been for over a week despite a little lovely c0olth, because of dealing with the “little” jobs that ended up eating hours) before the spring flowers disappear into the summer-brown heat.