Highs and lows

The lows:

If only I could communicate to you the tedium of reverse-proofing a manuscript. This is the process whereby you read a manuscript sentence-by-sentence, but start with the final page and work your way forward to the first page. So doing, it is easier to catch errors because the normal 'constructive' reading processes (e.g. imagining you can see the word 'of' when, in fact, the sentence does not contain it) are not fully engaged.

Bored yet? Try reading a novel backwards.

The highs:

No highs for me (unless you count publication, which will actually signal nothing more than the beginning of the marketing phase for Deja Vu), but several highs for those authors lucky enough to be nominated for the Man Booker Prize. (At this pont, let me say that I do not hold out even the wildest hope that Deja Vu will be nominated; it is a genre novel.) One of my favourite books of the last two years, Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell, has been nominated and is also the favourite. I'm extremely pleased about this. The book is a wonderful composite novel that comprises several short stories on the theme of slavery, with characters from a 19th century traveler to a far-future man-on-the-run. One day I might do a full review of the book, but for the time being, I urge people to read it. It is a rare doobery indeed: a piece of experimental fiction that transcends its experimentalism.

I haven't read the other books on the list, but I've spent a shocking amount on books already this month. My backlog has now reached about fifteen volumes.

Speaking of which.

Bell rings for final lap

A nice Olympic metaphor to start us off - or is that finish us off?

Yesterday I received the final manuscript of Deja Vu from Aliya, my editor. This is my last chance to make changes, and they'd better be minor ones or Aliya will fly over from Germany and beat me up. I'd deserve it, too. We've both done a great deal of work on the manuscript and if ain't good now, it never will be. It's time to pee on the fire, roll up the maltilda, and publish the bleddy thing.

I've printed it out for the last time using my new laser printer. I was getting pretty fed up with the cheap-as-chips printers that are all the rage these days: wonky and hugely expensive in terms of consumables. My new printer is quiet, fast and will save me money in the long term because, though I'm a certified technophile, I can't seem to read stuff on a computer screen.

One more thing before I go: if you'd like to have a copy of Deja Vu before Christmas, you will need to order it through the UKA Press website before the end of October. This is because the book will be published in a pre-ORD run for review copies, etc., in time for the actual release early next year. What's the difference between the official book and the pre-ORD version? None at all, though the cover of the official version may well contain snippets of favourable reviews.

What's that sound? Ah, the bell for the final lap. This Olympian effort - five years of work - is coming to an end.

Thanks the Gods for that.

What does an agent want?

I have always been amused by the oft-quoted remark of Freud's: 'What does a woman want?' It has been quoted out of context, but I was reminded of it this morning after receiving a second rejection letter from an agent. It is a reply from an enquiry I sent about a month ago offering some of my work for representation.

It is quite within my ability to appreciate that an agency operates using a limited staff, and must send out these letters (photocopied by the thousand, no doubt). But it does get puzzling when they reject my work without even requesting a copy. Is it because the agency is full (a possibility), or does this agency only accept writers with a guaranteed return?

Well, such moans don't make for entertaining reading, so I'll shut up shop on this entry and turn my attention to more productive things...

Busman's Holiday

(Please direct complaints about typos to the Italian evening air.)

I realized, when the suitcase was finally packed, that I had big plans for my holiday. Books - loads of them. A plethora, a glut, a veritable bookberg in my poor, groaning suitcase. As a writer, one of life's ongoing panics centres around the number of good books out there; how, sweet how, can I hope to produce good prose if I haven�?t read the best in sufficient quantity to have my skull bulging in a suitcase-like manner?

My knowledge of literature gives 'patchy' a bad name. I haven't read 'A Tale of Two Cities' although I've read 'Great Expectations'. 'War and Peace' goes unread, but I'm half-way through 'Anna Karenina'. I've macheted my way into deepest 'Ancient Evenings' and 'The Naked and the Dead' but I'm worried that 'Harlot's Ghost' might injure my foot if I drop it, so that remains unbought.

Now, of course, I have two glorious weeks of 'holiday' in which to correct a lifetime of reading enjoyable junk.

To Ravenna, I am accompanied by Bragg's 'The Adventure of English' (finished, you hear me, finished!), which is a thorough and often oddly-phrased work that charts the course of the Good Ship English around the world. Bragg is an enthusiastic dilettante and succeeds where others - Bryson, for example, with his irritating 'Mother Tongue' - have failed. Money and time well-spent. Next up is Tolstoy's 'Anna Karenina', but the bookmark refuses to travel through this one, don't look at me. After that, Kuhn's 'Structure of Scientific Revolutions', which I've already skipped to. It promises to be an interesting and important read; more credit for the bank of experience.

Part of me wonders whether this race (which will remain unwon on the day I, regrettably, die) is worth the spiked shoes. Is a writer a function of his reading, in the way that an organism's body is a function of its diet? Or is the writer greater than the sum of his parts? I think already we know the answer to this one, friends and neighbours. It's nature and nurture all over again. Whatever the percentage either way, the answer to this one is simple: stay in the race, keep reading, and keep writing.