Oh Dear

Um. A month seems to have passed since my last post. How did that happen?

And I had news! I have a cover! I have maps! I have galleys! My Little Town had the world's most uneventful town meeting! There are crocuses! (And still patches of snow, but if you squint they look like blazing white sand in a tropical setting, so that's OK.)

Anyway, to start the catch-up, here's the gorgeous cover for The Unnameables, designed by Linda Lockowitz. I think Photoshop is involved, but I don't know where the elements came from. Anyway, it's very cool, and fits the book beautifully.

The galleys are an unnerving experience, as I knew they would be. They look lovely (again the work of Ms. Lockowitz, I assume) but reading something I've written set in type has always made me hypercritical. I'm second-guessing every damn comma, and sitting on my hands to keep from making 4,385 corrections.

Bad enough that there are real mistakes to be corrected. I can't believe, at this late date, that I'm still finding world-building inconsistancies. Found one yesterday that has been in the book since the first draft, and I only just realized how inconsistant it is.

But if you squint it looks like it could have been deliberate. So that's OK.

Ship That Baby Out!

It's finished!

After two weeks of dithering, I just Fedexed my copy-edited manuscript to Harcourt in New York. That's it on the left there, 270 pages of it--the yellow post-it notes are the changes, mostly responses to style questions. I have style issues up the ying-yang because my setting is an island settled 300 years ago, whose inhabitants have renamed plants, animals, and themselves according to function. And modern Islanders still lapse into archaic English. That'll teach me.

So, should the Island name for rockweed be Cropfodder or cropfodder? Does the wood of the Sap Tree have to be Sap Tree Wood, or can we shorten it to Sapwood? Should unspoken quotations from The Book be italicized and in quotation marks, or just italicized? How about words-used-as-words (e.g. "The word of the hour is 'blabber.'")--should they be italic or just in quotes?

Oh, and would some Mainland trader have told an Islander about sweaters for the first time in 1900?

There were only a few content questions like that one (and the sailboat issue I mentioned in my last post). Some of the answers were in my head but some meant I got to revisit a few research sources--such as the Old Sturbridge Village site to find out exactly what the grist mill and sawmill should look like (for the map, I guess).

And just today the Oxford English Dictionary reminded me that "dost" is second-person singular and I twice had it first-person singular. And despite what you may hear on TV, the -eth ending on a verb ("he stinketh") is third person only.

I think I need to get out more.

I also got to check out a brand new library book, which the local librarian discovered and lusted after when I asked for help with the sweater question. It's No Idle Hands: The Social History of American Knitting and it shows pretty conclusively that Americans didn't know about sweaters until the late 1800s.

Ah, the writing life. Glamorous, ain't it?

Lisa Schoeder!

Over at the Class of 2k8 blog, it's Lisa Schroeder's week. She's on there now with an interview about her newly published verse novel, I Heart You, You Haunt Me. It's about a girl whose boyfriend dies but is reluctant to leave the world. So he haunts her! Early reports are that you need a tissue handy about halfway through.

The fact that the book is in verse makes it (surprisingly, to me) more accessible to reluctant teen readers, Lisa says. Simon & Schuster must have agreed, because their teen imprint, Simon Pulse, snapped it right up after her editor read it on his bus ride home.

I, meanwhile, am still slogging through my copy-edited manuscript. Should quotations from The Book be italic and quotes or just italic? What should be capped and what shouldn't? My characters use archaic language sometimes, which adds to the fun. Did you know that thou is first person singular, and ye is the first person plural? Try and keep track of that while figuring out about whether Sap Tree should have initial caps.

My best friend from high school, Shelly Perron, is a copy editor by profession and insisted on reading the manuscript. I couldn't imagine why, until I saw the results. Nothing against Harcourt's copy editor, who's amazing, but Shelly filled in some important gaps. For instance, at some point during my many revisions, I took out an exchange in which the Goatman told the main character, Medford Ruyuin, that he had arrived on Island by sailboat. And yet, in the existing manuscript, Medford still tells his friend Prudy how the Goatman got there.

Oh yeah? Shelly said. And how does Medford know that, hmmmm?

Heaven bless copy editors, that's all I can say.

Literary Theft

The Class of 2k8 blog is getting to be quite a hoot.

Last week, the feature was Liz Gallagher, author of the newly published The Opposite of Invisible. Next week it’ll be Lisa Schroeder, whose I Heart You, You Haunt Me is also out this month.

This week, various class members are blogging about things they “stole” for their books. (Not, I think, deliberately planned to coincide with the current brouhaha about romance novelist Cassie Edwards .) In 2k8’s case, the thefts are the likes of Elizabeth Bunce taking the name of a dog from Jane Eyre and Sarah Prineas studying Tolkien’s Elvish language to give her magic spells a little…well, magic.

This worries me, because I can’t think of anything I stole for The Unnameables. I know there has to be something. How could there not be? My mind’s a trash heap of trivia–surely there must be a line from Narnia or Harry Potter in there waiting to hit the page.

The Unnameables does create and quote a publication called A Frugall Compendium of Home Arts and Farm Chores by Capability C. Craft (1680)–sort of a combination of the Old Farmer’s Almanac, Martha Stewart, and Miss Manners. I acknowledge in print a bunch of sources for the “tips” in the Compendium, my favorite being the sixteen-year-old George Washington’s Rules of Civility & Decent Behaviour In Company and Conversation. I keep racking my brain to make sure I didn’t lift anything verbatim.

George’s reminders to himself about proper behavior bring home the fact that the Founding Fathers once were proper Englishmen. Here’s Tip #26: “In Pulling off your Hat to Persons of Distinction, as Noblemen, Justices, Churchmen &c make a Reverence, bowing more or less according to the Custom of the Better Bred, and Quality of the Person. Amongst your equals expect not always that they Should begin with you first, but to Pull off the Hat when there is no need is Affectation, in the Manner of Saluting and resaluting in words keep to the most usual Custom.”

This one’s my all-time favorite, though: ”9th Spit not in the Fire, nor Stoop low before it neither Put your Hands into the Flames to warm them, nor Set your Feet upon the Fire especially if there be meat before it.”

OMG. While looking for quotes from George I found this: “keep your feet firm and even.” I did incorporate those exact words into one of the Book’s behests. Hmm. Better check with my editor.

Paaaaranoia.
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Editing Terror

I got my copy-edited manuscript today, along with a letter from Harcourt’s managing editor gently reminding me how expensive and risky it will be to change anything beyond this stage.

I started writing this novel in November 2003. I’ve revised it five times, three times since Harcourt bought it almost two years ago. That’s four years of waking up at 2 a.m., grabbing a pen, and writing something like “would they know about prunes?” on the pad of paper beside my pillow.

Now the former Medford and the Goatman is called The Unnameables and is in the Harcourt fall catalogue. Once I finish going over this manuscript, that’s it. If I wake up at 2 a.m. and realize that Medford could not possibly know about prunes, that thought is arriving too damn late.

He would know about prunes. His language is basically the English of 1705. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, Shakespeare wrote about prunes in “Measure for Measure” in 1603. The word showed up in household accounts in the late 1400s. I know this. I looked it up twice.

At 2 a.m., though, who believes the Oxford English Dictionary?
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A Freelance Ne'er-do-well

It's never too late.

I’ve been a paid writer for 33 years. But I'm on my third attempt at becoming a novelist. It might be working this time.

When you’re the child of Depression-era New Englanders, willfully leaving the paid workforce is the eighth deadly sin. I feel even uneasier about this because of how hard it was to land my first writing job in 1974, the early feminist era. (For example, an advertising executive told me in a job interview back then that the best way to become a copywriter was to start as a secretary. “Yeah,” said Idiot Girl. “I noticed all the male secretaries on my way in.” End of interview.)

That’s why, every time I quit a perfectly good writing job for no good reason, I always tell everyone I’m “going freelance.” This sounds much more dashing and grown-up than the truth: “I’m going to sit and stare at a keyboard, and after an hour or two of that I’m going to eat cookies. Then I’ll take a nap. After several months, I’ll panic and look for paying work.”

The two times before this one, when I was in my 30s, I panicked almost immediately. Both times I actually did end up freelancing. But instead of fantasy freelancing — writing for impressive national magazines while turning out fiction on the side—the first time I wrote employee newsletters for corporations (by my low standards, fairly lucrative) and the second time I wrote for tiny local newspapers in Maine (not lucrative by anyone’s standards, but a real hoot).

The second attempt involved moving to Downeast Maine just when hippies and yippies (my generation) had been replaced in the popular imagination by “young urban professionals,” known as yuppies. My partner, Rob, and I decided we were orfans—“older, rural freelance ne’er-do-wells.” One of my new friends in Maine made us T-shirts saying that, so we felt like a trend.

In 1984, just after Rob and I moved to Maine and just before I panicked, I managed to write a dreadful, 60-page kids' fantasy called Medford and the Goatman. Thrilled to have actually finished something, I “copyrighted” it by mailing it to myself—the local postmaster cheerfully stamping the date all over the envelope—then stuck it in a desk drawer and forgot about it.

(Sociology note: The postmaster was a woman. There’s no such thing as a postmistress, at least not in Maine. They’re called postmasters, male or female. Same with selectmen. One time, a rogue typesetter at my tiny local newspaper took it upon himself to change “selectman” to “selectwoman” where applicable, ignoring the stated preferences of the town officials themselves. The community thought we were idiots—well, they already knew that, but this confirmed it. The typesetter got fired.)

I ended up working full time as managing editor for one of the tiny local newspapers, and later as arts editor for the much larger county weekly. I was perfectly content, without even a nudge of a thought about that envelope in the desk drawer. Then, out of the blue, in the spring of 2003 I decided to take a dialogue workshop offered by Cynthia Thayer, a novelist who lives in the same county I do. I had a great time, and was shocked to find that I wasn’t as rusty as I’d expected to be.

Two months later, with no cooperation from my brain, I heard my mouth giving the county newspaper three months’ notice. I was going freelance, I told everyone. And I would write a kids’ book.

Imagine my surprise when I actually did write a book, with characters and a plot and everything. It was a brand new version of Medford and the Goatman, four times as long and at least twice as readable.

Even more shocking, local summer residents Genie and Bill Henderson liked the book (he’s the founder of the Pushcart Prize and they’re both published authors) and sent it to Kate Schafer, a colleague of Bill’s agent at Janklow & Nesbit. Kate took me on, and eventually sold Medford and the Goatman to the patient and inspired Kathy Dawson at Harcourt.

Three re-writes later, Medford is called The Unnameables and scheduled for publication October 1, targeted for ages 10 and older. I’ve written another, smaller book for younger kids, which is seasoning in a drawer at the moment, and am about a chapter away from finishing the rough draft of a third book for the same age group as The Unnameables.

I can’t believe I keep finishing books. I can’t believe one of them is getting published. No T-shirt could capture this experience.

I never felt younger. In fact, I have a zit forming.