American Publication Day (was yesterday)!

Yesterday, The Lauras was released in the United States. It looks like this:

If I had favourite covers, this would probably be it.

Normally, publication day makes me anxious. Abnormally, my brother and his wife are visiting, and by the time we got to the part of yesterday by which I had finally woken up and was able to form coherent thoughts we'd already begun mixing drinks and talking about existential terror and our absent siblings' bad life decisions, so I never quite got around to remembering until the time for anxiety had passed. It was both celebratory (despite my forgetting there was something to celebrate) and less reminiscent of than a reprise of how we spent high school.

Luckily, other people remembered what day it was, and other people have been reading the book in the lead up. Kirkus and The New York Journal of Books both reviewed it ahead of time, and Bookriot has included it in the month's must-read new releases. There are other reviews in other places, and probably many that I've forgotten about or just missed. To my great joy, most of the reviewers seem to have 'got' Alex, and that was the biggest thing I'd crossed my fingers for. With any luck, the rest of the American reading public will also.

External validation

The Lauras comes out tomorrow, which means I'm halfway to a quivering ball of nerves - though that may be the six cups of black coffee that I've just drunk. It's not that I'm worried that the book will be badly received, because on a fundamental level I believe that the writing is the important part, and it being read once it's finished is somewhat superfluous. But I do have a fair amount of impostor's syndrome when it comes to my fictive tendencies, so the days leading up to a proving point, when something new goes out into the world and people are asked to respond to it, aren't exactly relaxing. I'm not sure what it is that's got me uneasy - but then, even though I can't say  what it is about cloudy water that makes me uneasy I still won't stay in the bathtub after it's gotten too soapy to see the bottom.

In the positive column I've got a firmer idea of what's going on than I did last time, and I've got enough of a reference point to know that what's going on is so far all good.

Yesterday I got to scoot into London to record a segment for BBC Radio 4's Front Row, which means that, as with The Shore, my first time talking about The Lauras was in a recording room with Kirsty Lang. Which was the best possible way to start things off, because Kirsty is wonderful. It's too early yet for me to have a solid idea of the sort of conversations the book will prompt, or to have well thought out responses to them, so her questions are my primer for what I should be thinking about as Edinburgh draws nearer and other speaking opportunities pop up.

The thinking is going to need to happen quickly, as I'm going back into London tomorrow afternoon for an interview with Radio Gorgeous, which is unexplored territory for me.

Text-wise, there have been good reviews in the Sunday Mirror, the Sunday Times, and Stylist Magazine, with rumblings of more to come. Even though no one's panned it as far as I've seen, I'm quite tempted to put my head down and pretend that none of it is happening. The writing is really the fun bit, and the thesis clock is ticking.

French Shore

Just found out that the French edition of The Shore is being released on November 14th! The cover is lovely, of course:

This makes four covers, for anyone keeping track.

And now I understand why Lucy wants me to space my books out a little bit more. Every time I think we've moved on to the next thing, something else happens with the last thing.

Finished copies!

Look what came in the post!

Earlier than expected, more than expected, and bluer than expected

The Lauras doesn't come out until August (the 5th, the 11th, or the 8th, I'm not sure; the day keeps moving), but finished copies have already been printed and are being slung around to reviewers and non-reviewers alike. While The Shore  looked in proofs a lot like the finished copies, with this one the final books seem to have a bit of extra oomph to them. It could be that they're simply far more blue.  

Finished on the left, proof on the right.

The jacket pattern kinda reminds me of the way I draft nonfiction

I can't make pixels convey exactly how blue that flyleaf is. You'll just have to get a copy.

So, absolutely no more meddling: it is finished. I can't change it any more. And while I'm happy that it is - and still can't believe that I've managed to get not one, but two novels into print in the traditional fashion - I'm just a little nervous about how it will be received. More so, I think, than I was with The Shore. 

Guess all I can do is wait and see what people think. 

And maybe throw copies at naysayers. But I only have twelve copies, and I can think of nearly two dozen people who will want one. 

Page proofs and covers

Last night Penguin books held a little social gathering (as they seem to frequently do) for people who either write about books or select the books that go into shops. It wasn't until I found the private club where the party was being held that I remembered that I haven't really left the house since December and have therefor completely forgotten how to act at these things. And I'm starting to suspect that final edits isn't a good stage during which to go out and be charming about books, because it seems that a project is only truly done when I've completely given up on it. The whole reason I get invited along is to be charming about books in the general direction of the people who can influence how many people read them; the reason I say yes is that it's a rare chance to meet writers who aren't products of Norwich. This time I was especially lucky in that I got to gush to Carys Bray over how much I loved A Song for Issy Bradley and The Museum of You, and got to meet Jenni Fagan well in advance of doing Edinburgh Festival with her later this year.

Jason also happened to be there, and in what felt both old-fasioned but appropriate to the fact that we were drinking wine in a private members' club in Soho, he gave me this:

Page Proofs! It should surprise no one that I have pens reserved specifically for the job of marking these up.

This should be the last batch of corrections, which makes me a little anxious because the revision process has been too quick this time for me to second-guess myself on anything. But I've three times regretted writing the book at all, which means that it's very close to being finished.

Over the course of the night it came out that I'm practically the only person who hasn't gotten to see the cover yet, because they haven't made up their minds and they don't want me to fall in love with a cover that gets binned. But it's only a week until the bound proof comes out, so Jason was easily convinced to hand them over:


 

Most of them are out of the running, but I like seeing all of the iterations. They look nothing like what I imagined they would, but they all fit the book very well.

Now all I have to do is learn to pronounce the title clearly enough so that people know what on earth I'm saying.

And so it goes...

I'm just a little bit proud of the fact that I got through a first pass of The Lauras in 36 hours, which means that the resulting draft is shorter by about 17,000 words (or one word in six) and the notes that Jason sent me now look like this:

 I'm trying to be organised, Mom, I swear! 

Since the first pass was mainly about reducing the size of the book like a contestant on a medically questionable reality TV show, any note that couldn't be dealt with by making a straightforward cut got marked with a tab. And since I'm eternally trying to overcome my entropic nature, they're colour coded: green-yellow is for notes that need a second look, pink for timeline issues, blue for differences of opinion, and orange for those rare moments where I have no idea what the note is asking me to do.

There aren't that many tabs, all things considered, but cutting that much will have left narrative holes that need to be puttied in. I've also got notes from Lucy that I'm hoping will cover anything that my editor missed.

Juuuust a little more intimidating than all the coloured tabs.

And while I'm at it, there's my own self to satisfy. During the cutting portion I kept running across sentences that needed to be tightened up, which means that I'm probably far enough away from the thrill of having written the thing to be able to see it clearly. Which means it's time to go through and make sure that every single word is the exact perfect word and ruthlessly remove any that aren't.

So, with all that to do and limited time to do it in, it makes perfect sense that the moment I finished the first pass was the moment that my brain decided it was vacation time, as certain brains are wont to do. What have I been doing since I finished the first past? God alone knows, because I sure don't. When will my brain come back and start behaving? With any luck, the moment I click publish and go make another cup of coffee. But that's assuming I don't run into any half-read books on the way back.

Notes!

It turns out that all of my inbox watching was in vain, because Jason's notes arrived in the form of a fat package through the post.

It weighs about as much as the two hardcovers he sent with it...

The manuscript is 300-odd pages long and just a little bit intimidating; I've given it a flip-through and several pages are crossed out entirely. But still, frightening notes are better than no notes, and I've been impatient to get back to working on it. With any luck there will be proofs to fling around by the time the London Book Fair arrives. I've heard rumours of cover art being ready to ogle in a week or so, though all things considered I'm not sure that said rumours aren't serving as the proverbial carrot: never to be held in the hand, much less made into cake.

Of course I can get through that in two weeks.


Famous last words.

Tentacles and paperback reviews

So I found out this afternoon that The Shore has been shortlisted for the Golden Tentacle, the category of The Kitschies ("The prize for progressive, intelligent, and entertaining literature with a speculative element") reserved for debut fiction. The fact that The Shore is being considered spec fic makes me clam-in-mud happy - it also makes me really want to go off and write some properly hardcore speculative fiction, but I've promised to finish the current projects before I start anything else. There are five books on the shortlist, and I'm crossing my fingers that I get a chance to get my dirty mitts on the other four. Winners are announced on the 7th of March, which isn't very long to wait at all. And there aren't any poets on the shortlist, so I've got a tiny measure of hope this time.

And while I'm broadcasting news, an author Q&A has gone up on the review site run by Deborah Kalb for anyone who has questions but won't get a chance to ask them. And the Sunday Times ran a review for the paperback edition that was wonderfully positive and used the term 'anti-pastoral.' I'm not sure if I should get that tattooed somewhere or just use it as my work credo - next should come an anti-road novel, then an anti-family drama, and one day maybe an anti-romance if I work really hard.

Usually I dread looking at my email inbox, and doubly dread needing to respond to anything, but after having all of that come in today I'm almost feeling downright fond of the monstrosity...

Flight and The Fiddlehead

About a decade ago, when I first found out that the literary magazines I nicked from the library and read samples from online accepted submissions from pretty much anyone, I made a hit list of the magazines where I most desperately wanted to be published one day. In the top three was The Fiddlehead, Canada's longest living journal. Given its reputation I figured I had not a chance but continued submitting anyway, since regular rejection letters are like strength training for the soul.

So I am pretty well ecstatic to say that "Flight," one of the pieces that was cut from the final edit of The Shore, appears in the Winter 2016 issue.

This issue, in fact.

"Flight" was one of my favourite stories. It was probably the most difficult to write and definitely took the most research - it involves rockets, NASA, and the 1950s - but since it's about an outsider coming to the Shore for the first time, and since the book was more than a little over length until the bitter end, it fell prey to the red pen. The book mostly focuses on one family, and this was one of the few pieces that could be taken out without disturbing the threads that connected all the rest.

But that doesn't matter now, because rather than languishing in a desk drawer the story is snugged up in an issue of a magazine in which I thought I'd never be good enough to have a place. And just in case the prospect of getting another nibble of the islands and the ponies isn't enough to tempt you over to The Fiddlehead's website for a copy of the issue, here's a glance at the opening:

It's probably time to invest in a new camera...

Paperback

I poke my nose above the drift of books and papers to say that, after having moved around quite a bit, the UK release date for the paperback edition of The Shore is February 25th! Though they lack the bludgeoning capabilities of hardback, I've always had a soft spot for softcover books - they seem more tactile, and they tend to be easier to lug around. A hardback belongs on the shelf where it can look impressive, a paperback belongs in the hand. And I always feel like I've committed a crime when my hardcover books get mussed, while the softcovers need the mussing to feel broken in and comfortable.

The US release date shouldn't be far behind, but I'm blowed if I can figure out when it is. My guess is that it will also move around a bit and then leap out when no one suspects - as so much in publishing seems to do.

On the topic of things leaping out unexpected: I've gotten back into the horrible habit of inbox watching, because any minute now either or both of my editors will send through their final stack of notes for The Lauras. Until that happens I'm stuck plodding responsibly on with postgraduate work, which wouldn't be that bad except I know that the moment that I start enjoying it the edits will come and I'll have to abandon censorship for the sake of finishing the book on time. I'm a bit tempted to get some chalk and the Harry Potter books and see if I can bastardise a spell into summoning edits in my kitchen - I was never allowed to read Harry Potter because it apparently taught you how to do magic, but given the time crunch I'm pretty sure a little magic would be more than justified.

The wreck's progress

About a week ago, as I was toddling back up to Norwich, I realised how many days weren't left in January. But my sense of time is rather bad, so I didn't start seriously fretting until I got the email from Jason that essentially ran, 'It's the last week of the month... where's the book?' At which point literally everything else was dropped, and anything that couldn't be dropped I brought my computer along to so that I could tweak lines during slack moments. So on Friday at half two in the afternoon, while sitting in the postgrad bar, I found myself unexpectedly at the end once again. And I sent the new draft off to Jason before I could talk myself into messing with it some more. And then I walked home feeling like my arm had dropped off, because it's been the only thing I've thought about in the past month and suddenly not needing to think about it felt wrong.

And then I got sick again. 

I've always spent term time getting whatever was going around, but this year's been a little ridiculous.  It's gotten to the point that I grab cold medicine every time I get groceries, because I know it'll be used. 

Between having finished a major project and spending the weekend being useless and miserable, I figured a reward was in order. So I went to the children's section of the uni library (we have a children's section; it is excellent) and had a poke around. And found this:

My love for this book and the age when I first read it probably explains a lot. 

When I was nearly nine my parents moved us from a tiny house right down the street from my aunt to a much bigger house in the county where most of the dying in the American Civil War took place, and where everyone I met was (is) still obsessed with it. 

I hated it. 

The only redeeming feature of the place was the size and quality of its library system. My sister was born weeks after the move, so no one paid much attention to what I was getting out. So the first (and for a while, the only) thing that made me happy in that place was Joan Aiken's books. After a while I began branching out, but I still vividly remember sitting on the cold kitchen floor on a blazing June afternoon, all the lights off and no one making a sound because Dinky and Mom were asleep, reading Blackhearts on Battersea as slowly as I could because it was almost over and I didn't want to come back to reality. They were the books that first made me want to see England - and now that I have seen England they're more than overdue for a re-read.

The cover's different from the one I first read, but the illustrations are the same!

And on the subject of books: when I got back a heap of them were waiting for me, because I'd had the presence of mind to do all of my overseas ordering before I left for Christmas. There are some good ones that I've been looking for for a while, but my favourite by far is:

Answer: it depends on whether or not you consider teaching your kids critical thinking to be 'harming' them. 

I'm still useless and miserable, but the next book is one step closer to done. Next should come line notes, then copyeditor's notes and page proofs, then a bound proof, then it's all over but the shouting. And when I think of it that way, August doesn't seem far away at all. 

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.

The next book

When Heinemann offered on The Shore I had a sneaking suspicion that it was a one-time triumph, and that after that first book was done and dusted I'd have to resign myself to an adulthood of actual adulting, and that any books that I happened to write after that would wind up in a desk drawer. So I am very pleasantly surprised that this isn't going to be the case just yet. The roadtrip novel I spent the summer busily revising (and for which no one, including the staff and editors at two publishing houses, can come up with a satisfactory name) has been picked up by Jason Arthur at Heinemann, and should be released (hopefully with a staggeringly beautiful title) in the summer of 2016.

The timeline for this one is much tighter than for the first - I should be dragging myself through edits before the year is over, hopefully while not under the influence of prescription anything this time, and all in all it looks like there will be a lot more hustling and a lot less sitting around. Two books in as many years is not usual in literary fiction - and my other work is showing why quite clearly - so it will probably be a while before Belief surfaces. This time around I feel a lot more relaxed about the whole thing, since I know how it all generally goes. But the biggest difference is, since the deal went through, I feel like I can call myself a professional writer now.

On a completely different note, I wonder what Henry will say...

Digging myself out

The end of term felt a little like re-entering Earth's atmosphere, with extra emphasis on the high-speed-towards-the-ground part, possibly because I dealt with the impossible workload by getting up early, staying up late, and eating exactly what my internal toddler demanded. So now that all of the really important deadlines are past it feels not so much like I've hit the wall as become embedded in the wreckage that was wall before I came at it at terminal velocity. I may have completely stopped responding to emails. And phone calls. And text messages. And my own name.

But on the upside, I'm in Reading once again with the work that I enjoy and free access to David's sweaters. And yesterday The Shore came out in the USA and Canada, which I've been looking forward to for so long that I completely blanked on the date - first I forgot that it hadn't come out already, then I forgot it was May already. Then my mother sent me this:

In hindsight, I'm really glad that I've got the next few projects on the go; if I'd waited until now to start the next thing I'd probably be too intimidated to begin. Although I've been told off recently by several people for having more than one project on the go at once, so there may indeed be no way to win at this besides utterly transcending my personal flaws.

Also also, somewhere in there I managed to come up with the bare bones of an author's website, almost as if I am a real, live adult!

It's possible that the only thing that is saving me at the moment is that I've got two books to work on at once. One book is at the first draft stage, and I found a while back that if I spend too much of the day writing I stop being able to speak. The other book is going through its first full revision, and if I spend too much of the day revising I usually manage to retain my powers of speech, but stop making any logical sense. So the net result is that I have one project to keep me busy in the morning, the other to keep me busy in the afternoon, and have generally stopped talking or making sense.

The first draft of the book for Henry is a little more than two thirds done, and looks like this: 

The closed notebook is full, the open notebook has about ten thousand words in it, and it's hard to tell from the photograph but the three sheets of A4 are the latest version of the outline and all but part three is checked off. And one of those pens has a very flat spot in the nib tip from dramatic overuse. 

 So, in an effort to preserve the tipping of my other pens I've switched back to bottled ink - cartridges are fun for variety, but they tend to flow slower than I write, which leads to drying up and scratching and nibs not lasting as long as they should.

The other piece of work (and it is a piece of work in every sense of the word) looks like this:

This is the novel that I wrote during the MA - in case I never said while I was working on it, it follows a woman and her kid on a trip across America in an attempt to settle a lifetime's worth of unfinished business. The stack on the left is the 149 pages that I've so far annotated for revision, and the so much smaller stack on the right are the 50 pages that still need to be gone through. Which, all things considered, isn't all that much left to comb through. This one will probably get a second go-through as I'm putting the ink and paper edits into the Word document, but I'm starting to get a sense of what shape it might be when it's finished - and starting to get a sense that it will be finished sooner than later. And, publishing aside, that's the really exciting part.

A most eventful week

Things I have learned this week: The Women's Prize has the best parties, Cambridge is lovely, publishing is full of awesome women, and Ali Smith is more lovely than words can describe. Ok, I knew the last one already, but it always bears repeating.

Monday evening the Women's Prize shortlist was announced, which means I got to skibble down to one of the Serpentine Galleries in London and spend the evening drinking champagne and Baileys, eating the best canapés I've ever encountered, and geeking out about books with some of the most well spoken and intelligent women I've ever encountered. I am somewhat relieved that The Shore didn't make the shortlist (though I blame Philip for jinxing it), as I found out that evening that shortlistees are going to be involved in what sounds like a terrifying number of public events for horrifyingly large numbers of audience members. Considering that I still hyperventilate and freeze in front of my classroom of thirteen students, that could only have ended messily.

Coming back from London I made a shocking error in judgement with regards to trains, and wound up waiting in Cambridge for the 2 AM National Express to Norwich to stop. Which makes a good story, but is something I'm going to try to avoid doing again.

On Saturday I got to go back to Cambridge by National Express, thankfully not at 2 AM, to be handy for the debut writer panel run by Ali Smith at the Cambridge Lit Festival on Sunday morning. The other two ladies were Sarah Bannan, whose novel Weightless reminded me of both The Virgin Suicides (in a very good way) and the parts of my childhood I haven't had the courage to write about yet, and Claire Lowdon, whose novel Left of the Bang is tight and suspenseful in a way that demands you keep reading as quick as you can while simultaneously demanding that you put it down for a moment to give your heart a rest. We had the chance to chat with each other in the green room ahead of the event, and I really hope that I run into both of them again. 

And today I return to real life, and the final week of classes. I'm a bit sad that I probably won't be teaching this batch of students again, somewhat relieved that I'll be getting my life back. There are more things that I want to do than can possibly be done over this summer - which thankfully hasn't booked up yet, though I already know that I'm going to be pretending to be a professional at the Edinburgh Festival on the 21st of August. Perhaps this summer will actually go to plan, for once.

Reading in Norwich

It's time for me to break my one year plus streak of successfully avoiding public readings - I'm going to be reading at UEA Live on the 19th of March, which is just under a week away. The event is held at Cafe Bar Marzano in the Forum in Norwich and is free to get in - and I can attest from experience that the drinks are good. It kicks off at 7.15 in the evening, but it's the kind of thing that you want to get to reasonably early if you want to sit down - I've had to stand the past three times I've been. 

And in related news: the release date for The Shore has been moved up a week, to (coincidentally) the 19th. Which means that there will be copies for sale at UEA Live. Hey, babies in my family tend to come early. 

Dry-gulched by good news

I've been keeping my head down for the past few months, avoiding reviews and write-ups not as much in an 'I've transcended the need for other's approval of my work' way as in a 'holy crap how am I supposed to get all this marking done' way. Both of which, I suppose, garner the same result: I have even less of an idea of what's going on than usual.

So imagine my surprise when I got a text from Sara Helen (who is the kind of together person who usually knows what's going on) saying I was on the same longlist as Ali Smith. I assumed this meant that someone had done a round-up - x books that challenge the concept of structure, y books with female narrators, z books by authors with last names whose initial letter come after 'R' in the alphabet - that had been shared out for other's reading pleasure. But any list on which Ali Smith appears is bound to be a good list to be on, so I went to investigate.

The longlist in question happens to be for the Baileys Women's Prize.

The Prize's existence I was aware of before, but in much the same way I'm aware of knighthoods and the Nobel: it exits, other people are considered for it.

The Shore is one of twenty books in the running; the complete list can be read here and is utterly fantastic. And I'm counting that as my accomplishment for the decade, since the longlist is so much more than I'd been expecting - it wasn't so long ago that I was gearing myself up for agent rejections. I'm very glad that I wasn't aware that it was up for consideration, and I'm somewhat regretting having looked up the details of the judging process, since I can do absolutely nothing but wait, impotently, until it's over.

Amusingly enough, Henry appears to have found out through an online betting service e-mailing to offer him 33 to 1 odds on me winning.

"The greatest joy in life lies in doing those things that you have been told you cannot do."

On Wednesday I skibbled down to London to listen to Nick Harkaway, Anna Smaill, and Helena Coggan converse about writing in general and their latest books in particular. Harkaway's eyebrows stole the show. If they hadn't, his suit would have. Together they almost completely distracted everyone from the fact that Coggan is fifteen years old, a fact which I'm hoping will deflect some of the age-related side-eye I've been getting and will probably continue to get for a while. I don't know where this pressure for precocity comes from, but I do wish a bit that someone would hook up sensors to a pregnant woman, transcribe the fetus' brain waves, and publish the results as the novel written by the youngest author ever so we can all stop worrying about age - until someone figures out how to get electrical readings off a zygote, that is. No one has any control over their age, so it baffles me a bit that we make anything of it. But then, there is still a part of my flinty heart that longs to be the youngest winner of the Booker.

While in London I dropped in to see Jason and Anna and all of the wonderful people that get to work in the lovely book warren that is Random House. They had been expecting a box from the publisher, which the publisher insisted had been sent and the RH post room insisted had not, and at the end of the day it turned out that the box had accidentally been mixed in with some trade paperbacks in the publisher's warehouse.

Which is why I had a packet come in the mail this morning:

I give you: hardback!

I had copies of the proof to throw around, but they only show so much of how the book will look when it's done. For instance, I didn't know it was going to be purple. Ok, technically, it's mulberry. Which makes me happy because I love purple and I spent just gobs of my childhood getting mulberries into my face as quickly as humanly possible.

I have read so many books with that windmill embossed on the front. 

Joyously and surprisingly enough, some of the people to whom the proofs were sent actually read them, and read them in time to have an opinion. And then were kind enough to provide that opinion:

And while they are all very nice quotes, one in particular made me completely and utterly lose all composure:

When I asked them to send a proof to Maureen Duffy, I didn't imagine she would actually read it.

So there was a moment of joy and satisfaction, but as I was paging through - not looking too closely, because I know that if I do I will find a mistake - the thought crept into my head: I was twenty-two when I wrote this book. I bet I could do so much better now... 

Oh dear...

Day of reckoning

This morning, a box came.

BOX!

And inside it were these:

BOOKS!

I'll be off in the corner doing the mad scientist laugh for a little while. 

COLOPHON!

The editorial process - with pictures!

Somewhere near the end of September, the first round of editorial notes for The Shore popped up in my inbox. Since I was in the middle of making a wedding happen at the time, I wailed in desperation once, plowed through them as thoroughly as possible, and winged the result back to my editor. I'm not sure if it's the same across the board, but in this case the notes consisted of a list of comments regarding specific pages and lines, and a shorter list of comments on the general structure and content. For the most part they were about things that had been bothering me already; the biggest change was cutting out one chapter and dividing the longest chapter into two, a massive change which massively improves things but that I wouldn't have had the resolution to do on my own.

Fast forward a month or so (thankfully to the other side of the wedding) and a two-inch thick printed version of the manuscript arrived by post, having been thoroughly gone over by a copyeditor:

The fuzzyness isn't so much to prevent spoilers as me needing to get a better camera.

Besides the little squiggles having to do with typographical corrections and consistent punctuation, the copyeditor also sent a batch of notes. Most of them were exceedingly useful - like everyone I have a bad tendency to repeat words within paragraphs and pages, and a lot of the dates have been shuffled without being properly double-checked against each other. Other ones... My favorites so far are 'It would be a bit hard to get an entire breast in his mouth, surely?' and 'do roads in the States have a double yellow line up the middle?' 

The notes from the American editor came across while I was halfway through the copyeditor's, so both were dealt with at the same time over a manic four days, because the typesetter needed the finished draft as soon as humanly possible. 

Fast forward to yesterday, and this showed up:

Flat proofs, also two inches thick. These are the same two pages as above, but laid out the way it will look when it's published. I'm a bit in love with the typeface.

This time, instead of working from a list of notes and emailing back my corrections with page and line references, I get to mark up the actual paper with anything (reasonable) I think needs to be changed and mail it back, and a little bit after that a paper-bound copy of the proofs should come winging back.

Fortunately for me, this batch of revisions is a little less urgent: yesterday morning I tried to pick a shirt up off the floor, my lower back went 'I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him,' and now I owe a lifelong debt of gratitude to the doctor at the Reading walk-in clinic for dealing with it compassionately, the NHS for making it free, and my spouse-thing David for all but carrying me there. In the plus column, now I know what diazepam and prescription-strength muscle relaxants feel like, which is something like novocaine only in my brain. In the minus column I am not Hunter S. Thompson, so between the drugs and the fact that there is no position in which it does not feel like the Red Pyramid is ripping out the last foot or so of my spine, I don't foresee anything getting done in the next little while that won't have to be chucked out and done again when I can think clearly.

When I have finished marking up the flat proofs, and the bound proofs come wandering back, they should look a bit like this:

MY BABY HAS A FACE!

I've been keeping the cover to myself since I got it, but now that it's possible to pre-order on Amazon I figure I'm allowed to show it around a little. The above is the UK cover, courtesy of the incomparable Suzanne Dean; the US cover is quite a bit different, though the innards are the same: 

MY BABY HAS TWO FACES!!

This is apparently because the two markets are very different in regards to what kind of covers sell. I'm more than a bit relieved that neither of them involve a tube of lipstick, a stiletto heel, a cosmopolitan glass, or a photograph of half of a woman's face with the gaze directed away from the viewer.

 The US pre-order is here, and the UK pre-order is here; I found out that they existed when my cousin posted them on Facebook about a month ago. I'm still trying to figure out how to keep any relatives or similar individuals whose good opinion I want to retain from seeing them, but that might be a lost cause.  

And now if you will excuse me, there is a sofa with a hot water bottle calling my name.