Month: October 2021

(E________, first draft: 13,600 words)

The U.S. version of Braking Day has come back from copyediting. Copyediting (and copy editors) have always been a mystery to me. I had this vague sense that it involved correcting typos but it’s so much more than that. For better or worse, copy editors are the enforcement arm of the style manuals.  The copy editor is the one who makes sure the manuscript’s syntax is smooth, that the writing adheres to the conventions of grammar, that wording is proper and precise and that punctuation is both appropriate and correctly placed. When it comes to fiction – and science fiction, in particular – this is not an easy job. How do you tell when we have roughed up the syntax for dramatic emphasis as opposed to just screwing it up? Is bad grammar in the dialog the way a character speaks or a failing in the author? Which version of a made up word is spelled correctly? Copy editors wrestle with this every single day.

On top of that – and I really did not appreciate this – the copy editor is the last line of defense against howlers in the text: “How can this character be opening a door when he’s still sitting down?” Thank you, Copy Editor, thank you!

The copy edit for Braking Day is a masterclass in that bible of American English, the Chicago Manual of Style. While, as predicted, the copy editor came after my idiosyncratic attachment to alright instead of all right, I learned just how much I still do not know about punctuation, word usage (a hold versus ahold, for instance), and (embarrassingly) basic grammar.

The most eye opening thing about this exercise, however, concerns numbers. Everything I know about writing numbers can be summed up as follows: if it’s ten or less, spell it out in words, otherwise use numerals.

Hah!

For starters, CMoS (which sounds more like a computer language than a style-manual acronym) “advises” you to spell out numbers up to and including one hundred. No reason is advanced: it just does. And there’s more….

Don’t start a sentence with a numeral. Write it out. “Three hundred and eleven men and 302 women took to the streets.”

Spell out round numbers. “The pot was thought to be six thousand years old. Radiocarbon dating indicated a precise age of 5,998 years.”

If two numbers need to be placed next to each other, spell out the smaller number. “He ordered 15 twelve-foot boards.” “The platoon was arrayed in three 12-person rows.”

When writing discourse, numbers should usually be spelled out, with some exceptions (years, for instance – but why?). ” ‘We found a hundred and eleven bodies,’ he said, remembering. ‘That would have been back in 1985.'”

Working through all this has been a trip. I’ve learned a lot and will try to apply it to the E________ manuscript this winter. The kicker, though, is that every one of these rules has exceptions. It’s enough to drive one mad!

Or to take up copyediting.

(E________, first draft: 10,300 words)

Some ideas are so bad, so obviously stupid, so not in your best interests, that you can’t stop acting on them.

Years and years ago, when I was a junior barrister, I had a court case in Stoke-on-Trent, England. Stoke, by the way, is at the heart of the region known as The Potteries, for all the fine china that is produced there. (Edward Smith, captain of the Titanic, was also born nearby.) Stoke was roughly an hour up the road from where I lived at the time so, prudent young man that I was, I left home an hour before I needed to get there.

For reasons that are not entirely clear to me, what barristers do and how they do it is a mystery to large chunks of the outside world. That said, the one thing almost everyone does understand about barristers is that they wear wigs and gowns when they appear in court. This, in fact, is not always true, but it was very true on this particular day. Turning up in court without a wig and gown in such situations feels pretty much the same as appearing naked in public. Judges, if they have a mind, will announce after you have spoken that they “can’t hear you,” and raising your voice won’t do the slightest bit of good. All you can do is slink shamefaced out of court and hope one of your colleagues of approximately the same size will take pity on you and let you borrow their duds. The price being, of course, that he or she gets first shot at spreading the tale of your abject humiliation around the barristerial community at large.

Needless to say, the one thing I did obsessively and repeatedly before getting in the car that morning was to check that I had packed my wig and gown. And there they were, packed (reasonably) neatly beside my law books and pink-ribboned “brief.”

As I rolled up the motorway with no margin for error I suddenly thought, “It would be horribly embarrassing if I forgot my wig and gown. Thank goodness I didn’t!” I’m sure I smiled a little at the absurdity of it and moved on to other things. Like my upcoming case.

But what if I had forgotten my wig and gown?

I didn’t.

Yeah, but what if you did?

The miles continued to roll by and soon the thought that I’d left my wig and gown behind became the only thing I could think about. I knew I’d packed my stuff properly. I knew if I stopped to check, I would be late for court. I knew I was being silly.

I pulled over anyway.

I arrived late.

This kind of irrational behavior is known as giving in to the “imp of the perverse,” after the 1850 story of the same title by Edgar Allan Poe.

“[T]hrough its promptings we act, for the reason that we should not. In theory, no reason can be more unreasonable, but, in fact, there is none more strong. With certain minds, under certain conditions, it becomes absolutely irresistible.”

The other day, typing happily away at the early pages of E________, it suddenly occurred to me that what I was writing might be garbage. What if EK, the first of my two protagonists, comes across as a complete, total, unacceptable jackass? No one will like him, no one will read the book, it’s going to be a disaster. You should delete everything and start again.

I know this is a really stupid idea, the manifestation of some kind of insecurity or, possibly, a dodgy egg sandwich. But it would not go away. I literally had to turn off my computer and walk away from my desk to stop myself erasing several thousand words worth of work.

The next day I sat down, opened up my laptop and found that Poe’s evil imp was still sitting on my shoulder. At the end of the day, though, I managed to fight it off.

Two things saved me. First, I remembered a quote from that peerless mistress of SF, C.J. Cherryh: “It is perfectly okay to write garbage–as long as you edit brilliantly,” which transmogrified in my head to, “Write first. Worry later.” Then my second protagonist, AE, made her first appearance. As she is, in many ways, EK’s antithesis, writing her was like pouring antacid on the indigestion EK is causing me. I stopped worrying and got back to the sheer joy of throwing words onto the page. The imp of the perverse has been beaten!

For now.

(E________ first draft: 4,300 words.)

I do not have time to watch anywhere near as much TV as I would like. I have, however, made some for Hulu’s Only Murders in the Building, a “cozy” comedy-mystery set in a New York apartment building. Apart from episode six (a hot mess saved only by the actors), it’s a funny, beautifully written show wrapped around a genuinely intriguing mystery. Episode eight dropped yesterday. I’m already jonesing for nine!

One of the three main characters in Only Murders is played by Steve Martin. His character, Charles Haden-Savage, is a past-his-prime actor who was the eponymous star of a 90s police show called Brazzos. A show so successful that his catchphrase, “This sends the investigation into a whole new direction!” is still remembered 30 years later.

Of course, one of the reasons I can’t watch as much TV as I would like is that I have now started on the first draft of E________. As readers of this blog will know, I have already outlined the novel, so “all” I have to do is write it! E________, unlike Braking Day, has two protagonists, the first of which, EK, has now appeared on the page.

And has completely messed with me.

When I drafted the outline, I had a very clear idea of what EK was going to be like. When he arrived, however, he was a great deal cruder and significantly more intelligent than I originally envisaged. Put another way, he is a completely different character, which means that his reactions to the situations in which he finds himself is not what I thought they would be, which means the scenes don’t go the way I thought they would, which means, of course, that the outline is not going to win prizes as a roadmap.

But that’s OK. Roadmaps are boring. Outlines should be more like nautical charts, preferably old ones, with coastlines marked “terra incognita,” or “here be dragons.” When you drive, you have to go where the road makes you go. But when you sail you have to wander. There’s no other way to do it. There are currents and contrary winds, storms and unnerving calms. You can never keep a straight course: to go north you tack north west, then north east, then north west again as wind and current dictate. You can sail past islands you never intended to visit, see the mountains of an undiscovered continent loom suddenly on the horizon, fill up on water at the mouth of an unknown river.

But if the map is true, you will still get where you’re going. EK has taken E________ “into a whole new direction.” But it’s a thrilling one, and if we have to sail a different tack to accommodate it, so be it. When we finally drop anchor at our destination, the chart we used to get there will be filled with exciting new details: “terra cognita” and “no, really, I mean it: there were actual dragons.”

Let out the mainsail. Time to see what’s out there!