The Spider's Bride; proofs and momentary introspection

[smokingboot]

Well, there it is, my little book. Today I have gone over the proofs; only one serious amendment needed, lots of typos though. How I am supposed to add my changes when the thing's been sent to me as a pdf I've no clue. Guess I'll just email the list across.

It has been edited very gently indeed.

Many months have passed since I looked at the manuscript. Now I see with fresh eyes its weaknesses and flaws, glitches I cannot remove without major rewriting, and I wouldn't want to do that. It is what it is, and I am astonished by it.

What a pretty filigree it is, cold and delicate and intense.

I read on someone's lj recently a quote from Chesterton about how a bad book tells you about its author. By such criteria, The Spider's Bride must be a very good book,* because no climate could be further from me than this snowflake construct. This is not me, the lacemaker who put this together should be a part reptile girl with fragile features and luminous eyes. Her hair should be black, her body consumptively thin, and her room full of dolls and spiders with a decapitated My Little Pony in the corner. She shouldn't make it past her teens - the brat is clearly mad and will be dangerous by then. We'll know it's happening when her eyebrows meet in the middle and she renames herself after a poisonous plant.

Tomorrow I will send the proofs back with corrections. Today, I wonder who this woman is I see in the mirror, who wrote a strange little story with a lot of help from friends, seen and unseen. Cos for all my love of The Spider's Bride, I just don't recognise her.

*Or perhaps Chesterton was just talking more unmitigated rubbish than usual.

Comments

[wildwinter.livejournal.com]

*laughs* How peculiar - I just sent you an email about The Spider's Bride.

Anyway - if you actually have Acrobat itself (rather than Acrobat Reader) you can annotate PDFs, but that's expensive.

You can try FoxIt, which is an excellent and fast PDF reader with a bunch of plugins, one of which is annotation. Unfortunately the annotation plugin costs, but it's not much, and as I say FoxIt is very good.

The other one I've come across - but not used myself - is PDF Xchange Viewer, which is apparently completely free and allows annotation. Let me know if it's any good!

(Those last two are Windows - on the Mac, Apple's built-in 'Preview' application i.e. the default app for viewing PDFs and images will let you annotate - there's a button on the toolbar).

Hope that's all helpful!

Ian

[smokingboot.livejournal.com]

Yes thank you, very! I'll check the protocol with my agent, and I may well be back, asking for more advice!

But I haven't received an email from you apart from the above I'm afraid. Did you send it to my likely story address?

[wildwinter.livejournal.com]

Yes, I think so...

Not critical at all - just to say that I've just an email from Amazon about your book, and that's it's therefore really real and all going to happen. *grin*

[smokingboot.livejournal.com]

I've received it now, thank you:-) But I won't believe it's real until I see it on the shelves.

[november-girl.livejournal.com]

But you DO have fragile features and luminous eyes.....

...oops, was that the wrong thing to say?

*Grin*

[smokingboot.livejournal.com]

It's a lovely thing to say, though as yet I have not mastered the consumptive waif with horse's head nearby image!

[cyanidemigraine.livejournal.com]

see, when i run roleplaying games its only many weeks later i walk past say...a billboard that i walk past every day and realise "hang on, that man was in my game a month ago" my brain seems to absorb everything like a sponge and store it in the same place i go window shopping for creative ideas.. i think if i ever wrote a book id be terrified that unbeknownst to me id included all my friends, and the nice lady who smiled at me that morning, and my favourite tv series etc etc

i guess i just dont trust my subconcious when you get right down to it :D

[smokingboot.livejournal.com]

I don't trust your subconscious either - or mine come to that - but I know your book would be awesome:-)

[hybridartifacts.livejournal.com]

Its odd how we expect insides and outsides, realities and dreams to somehow match up and find owners that fit. Perhaps its just that our mental images are not complex enough? I took a 'Goth test' a while back (results in my journal) where I scored way higher than some other people I know who are very visibly Goth (while as I am sure you will remember, I am not). I wonder if we are so used to things being packaged for consumption-neatly labelled and able to be fitted into boxes-that we fail to see that the wonder of both the heart and the imagination is that actually the real content is often quite different from the packaging. That inside a rather ordinary looking person might lurk a mythic dragon, in a nondescript one a killer, in an elderly person a child? Conversely of course under the skins of the great and the famous may lurk timidity, inability and fear. That hero may turn out to be a coward, the great leader a puppet.

So-maybe the reptile girl with luminous eyes hides inside you and just never bothered to show herself in public much? Then again-perhaps us creative types open ourselves up more to the 'other' and invite invasions of our identity from outside to speak through us-like we are the children of some strange voodoo-possessed and speaking with the voices of the dead...

I am incredibly impressed by your ability to realise that you have reached a 'hands-off' time with major changes btw-that 'it is what it is'. I was talking with some friends about the various versions of the film Bladerunner recently, and raised the point that for me, however flawed, the cinema release is the definitive version (and the others unnecessary tinkering). The cinema release represents the film as a moment in time, the conclusion of a process. All creative works are ultimately the sum of the compromises as well the vision involved in their production-they are moments crystallised and then we move on. I worry about Scott's inability to recognise this-is it a sign of his need for more money, or that he is unable to divorce his ego from the process of production? Is he such an 'auteur' that he fails to recognise the reality of creation is that the creative will always see things to change and revise over time, always want to control and possess their creations, when in truth we all have to learn when to just let go?

[smokingboot.livejournal.com]

As ever, you say so much and it sends my mind spinning off in so many different directions!

I agree with what you say about this strange possession by 'other' and I wonder who it is that is speaking; Is the dreamtime outside of the self or within, are all those voices mine/ours, all those faces part of you and I, or is there some deeper world where everyone's thoughts and dreams wait, like a library we can access if we just know how? On the show I had one guy call me to tell me I reminded him of his girlfriend ('a little bit goff!'he called it) but even Goffdeb isn't quite the same as our little part reptile, who does herself no good craving the winter magics that will slow her blood too long...I wonder if she will ever materialise again now that the story is done.

Regarding letting go, I am actively terrible at it, so I had to train myself. It's a question of time and giving up control.

[hybridartifacts.livejournal.com]

My mind seems to be constantly spinning off in multiple different directions (sometimes they meet back up and have a chat). Its a strange way to live really and produces all sorts of odd ideas and comments from me that are quite beyond my control. Terry Pratchett (whose books I actually don't like much) once said that ideas kind of float around and get picked up like tv signals by receptive people who sometimes put them to use, but if not someone else that picks them up will. I think I must be some sort of sorting office for them. I have far to many to actually put most of them to any good use so I just adjust them and pass them on.

Letting go and knowing when to stop is terribly hard unless you hit a brick wall (which is terribly painful).

[smokingboot.livejournal.com]

Letting go and knowing when to stop is terribly hard unless you hit a brick wall (which is terribly painful).

Never a truer word spoken...

[lucyas.livejournal.com]

I think it is fantastic you are having a book published. I'm really looking forward to buying a copy when it comes out.

(note to self, must add to Amazon wish list))

[smokingboot.livejournal.com]

Thank you, I think it's fantastic too - it feels like it's a fantasy that may never happen! My nerves are hopelessly jittered, I'm not sleeping and I have teenage spots again. Proof-reading's a nightmare. I envy you your ability to do it!

[lucyas.livejournal.com]

Reading one's own work is always difficult - it's much easier to put red lines through someone else's stuff!

[bytepilot.livejournal.com]

She shouldn't make it past her teens - the brat is clearly mad and will be dangerous by then
Coff.

Darling girl, each of us carries the pattern of half a thousand* people with in us. Alternatives branching and rebranching on the decisions we almost made, extrapolations from speculative thought and wonderings on the ever present subject of "what if".

Embrace your inner waif, she's standing closer than you think to the twisted, embittered spinster busy growling her way to the end of a life filled with shatterd fragments of self loathing that can only be survived with the blunting effects of a bottle of cheap gin.** Just after sunset she nods to the cheerful poet, plump and happy in her own slightly whimsical domain where she exerts an iron control over every aspect of her life other than the flashes of breathtaking inspiration that she considers only slightly greater blessing than curse.

All of these are within you, every possible implication of every thought you have ever had or heard is echoing around your mind, waiting its opportunity to shine.

Goff Waif Debs has written a book, which of you is next in line for the pen ?

Sez I, and I know everything, me.

*512 to be exact. 2^3^3
**Aaaand breathe, this is why I will never make a writer

[smokingboot.livejournal.com]

The latest id will only become clear to me at the end of hte next novel. Right now I suspect it's a peyote fried nun from Rio, but you know how it is...*cue dramatic hiss/laughter from the abyss* Legion am I called for we are many!

Sometimes I don't know which of us worries me more:-D