Notes

On the absolute last day in 2015 before I completely gave up and surrendered to Christmas, family, and what is starting to look like a chronic respiratory infection, I toddled into London to see Jason. It was one of the more entertaining trips: the man seated next to me on the Tube was reading appallingly unedited erotica in eighteen-point font on the largest tablet known to humanity (the word 'panties' was used without a touch of irony, and the wrong 'their' and 'to' was used repeatedly.  (I read far too fast for my own good.)) and I got to the Random House office just in time to get a good seat in the lobby to watch as a pair of uniformed Metropolitan Police wandered in and asked to speak to the person who had phoned about receiving a bomb threat (Said threat came in the form of a letter, because publishing is apparently nothing if not completely civil at even the worst of times.).

The next draft of the nameless novel is due at the end of January, and rather than go back and forth by phone and email and muddle through tracked changes and misinterpret written instruction and get everything confused, someone (it may have been me, I don't remember) decided that the best way to get to understandable, executable editorial notes was for me to sit down with Jason and talk through everything that either of us thought might need addressing. This was much more enjoyable than one might expect, since there are several things about the current draft that I'm not crazy about and wanted to figure out just how much bending someone else thought they might be able to take, as well as several parts that are not as bad as I thought.

And now that it's the first day of 2016 on which I can reasonably expect to get work done it's time to take the pages of notes I wrote during that meeting out and see what can be done with the book. Which, despite our having talked about it as much as anyone can a work in progress without completely killing it, still doesn't seem to have a final title. The two at the top of the list at the moment are In Passing and The Lauras, but I'm expecting to hear from Jason at any minute that he's changed his mind. Not only is it difficult to talk about a book with no title, but the cover artist can't get started with her design until the name of the thing is nailed down, so it would be nice to have the name pinned firmly down. Given the fact the publication date is less than nine months away, I'm starting to wonder if it's possible for a book to go forth into the world nameless and come to anything but misfortune.