Only the Editor knows for sure.\u00a0 But I hope it’s done done and gone, because after a time a book being worked on has definitely lost its savor for the writer.\u00a0\u00a0 Sent it off yesterday.\u00a0\u00a0 There wasn’t dancing in the street, because I was stiff from sitting at the computer for hours a day and my eyes hurt, but there was rejoicing, nonetheless.\u00a0 I have noticed, in the decades I’ve been sending things off and getting comments back, that editors are prone to say things like ‘just a few tweaks’\u00a0 when, to the writer, the quantity and complexity of notes and tasks feels like someone’s just rolled that stone back down the hill and you’re going to have to dig it out of the mud, resculpt it to a smooth impervious sphere (you hope) and roll it back up.\u00a0 The really terrifying words are “This really shouldn’t take you too long…”\u00a0 (They weren’t said this time, but I remember the hollow feeling I had when they were, and the things to be changed were numerous and not as simple as then-editor thought.\u00a0 Not simple for me, anyway.)<\/p>\n
It ate my week, cost me exercise days (again!) and interfered with my earlier plans for buying a few new things for DragonCon.\u00a0 Cost me sleep, too.\u00a0 Yesterday after sending it off I took the first nap in a week, and slept more than 5 hours last night.\u00a0 Yay for sleep.\u00a0 Perks up the aging brain like nothing else, so long as that’s not all you do.\u00a0 So this morning I rode my bike and calculated that I could go on and ride almost the distance I’d planned to reach today before the crunch started.\u00a0\u00a0 8.66 miles, not 8.75, but a solid jump from 8.1, which was back then.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 On the bright side, I found that skipping those days–while contributing nothing to my fitness level–did not result in much loss of condition.\u00a0\u00a0 So I was able to ride 8 miles and 0.66 more.<\/p>\n
The book is better…the biggest improvement this time was Editor pointing out that 8 + 6 was 14, not 7.\u00a0\u00a0 I hadn’t thought 8 + 6 was 7, because that would be really<\/em> lame, but I had thought 28 + 14 was 35, not 42, (I was multiplying 7s, and simply forgot about 6 * 7)\u00a0 which–in the book–amounts to the same thing.\u00a0\u00a0 It’s one of those things where if a train leaves NYC for Chicago at 5:28 and travels at 52 mph and another train leaves NYC for Chicago on a different track and travels at 59 mph,\u00a0 will they reach Chicago at the same time or nearly? \u00a0\u00a0 Not trains, and not NYC and Chicago, but I needed the ships (not trains) to arrive in Port Major at about the same time and in bad weather. \u00a0 Not bad enough they’d sink, but bad enough they weren’t easy to spot until they were in the harbor. \u00a0 I think I mentioned that I was getting increasingly tired through the first rewrite, and the first things to go with me when I’m really tired these days are multitasking\u00a0 and math.\u00a0 I’d like t0 blame it on that, but maybe not.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Today, rested, I was able to calculate (when I passed our driveway at 7.72 miles, riding at about 12 mph)\u00a0 how much farther I had to go to reach 8.5, and what the bike computer should read when I turned back\u00a0 (it was close to the end of the street, so I went to the end, even though that was going to be longer.)\u00a0 When I’m tired I can’t do that while riding on the bike with enough attention on the road.<\/p>\n So what else can I tell you?\u00a0\u00a0 Well…you might want to reserve absolute belief in what people say.\u00a0 OUR side tells the truth as they know it, but they can be mistaken.\u00a0 The OTHER side may or may not, even to their allies.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Thus if A says this happened because X was lazy and careless, and B says this happened because someone (unnamed)\u00a0 interfered…either one might be right, or they could both be wrong.\u00a0 There are other-side POV sections in this book, and their actions speak truth more than their words….readers will know more than the protagonists at some point (and more than the opposition on other points.)\u00a0 There’s considerable blundering around the dark going on.\u00a0 There are legal, political, financial, and military subplots (or at least influences.)\u00a0\u00a0 And there are dogs.\u00a0 Blame my new web-guru Karen for that. She didn’t tell me to, but I have been held down by several of her Golden Retrievers from time to time, and the memory of my mother telling me about the dog that helped me learn to stand and walk (Blondie, a Golden\/Chow cross)\u00a0 forced dogs in.\u00a0 No collies (my own dog, Lad, was a collie and a wonderful help in difficult years.)<\/p>\n Re-reading the end of Cold Welcome<\/em> won’t hurt (many of you are, I know) ,\u00a0 as some of the characters will recur and Into the Fire<\/em> starts the next day.\u00a0\u00a0 Characters are several years older, and I hope several years smarter.\u00a0 You will finally find out what really happened (or part of it) to Great-aunt Grace that put her in a psychiatric hospital.\u00a0\u00a0 And some other things.\u00a0 I’d better go now, and get back to the bread dough.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Only the Editor knows for sure.\u00a0 But I hope it’s done done and gone, because after a time a book being worked on has definitely lost its savor for the writer.\u00a0\u00a0 Sent it off yesterday.\u00a0\u00a0 There wasn’t dancing in the street, because I was stiff from sitting at the computer for hours a day and Read More…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38,32,10],"tags":[39,17,7],"class_list":["post-387","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-into-the-fire","category-progress","category-the-writing-life","tag-into-the-fire","tag-life-beyond-writing","tag-the-writing-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/387"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=387"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/387\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":388,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/387\/revisions\/388"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=387"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=387"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=387"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}