Wednesday, October 30, 2002
Yesterday I printed a full copy of the ms. of the first draft of Low Red Moon for my editor at Penguin (it took about five hours of continuous printing; my once state-of-the-art Apple Personal LaserWriter, circa 1993, is, sadly, no longer state of the art) and edited Chapter Two of The Five of Cups.
Working on the latter was especially strange. I probably wrote the bulk of Chapter Two in the summer of 1992, probably about August, so here's a piece of my writing that's more than ten years old. There are glimmers of the voice I have now, here and there, but it's much more like reading someone else's work than reading my own. That summer I could not have imagined the things that lay ahead, and that TFoC was the first step on a very long road. Or, perhaps, I could have imagined it; I just didn't allow myself to do so. I was writing that novel because I needed to do it, for a lot of reasons, most too personal to list. I never actually believed it or anything else I would write might actually be published, much less did I dare to imagine I would eventually make some kind of success at this, that I'd be able to support myself by writing alone. That ten years later I would be looking back at the ms., once sold but still unpublished and yet the indespensible start of my career — the book that got me an agent, that brought me to the attention of other authors, etc. — a genuinely odd thing, TFoC. At least if you're me, looking at it ten years after the fact.
I'll edit Chapter Three today, and get the ms. for Low Red Moon in the mail to New York.
It's still grey here in Birmingham, home of the world's largest disassembled iron statue. Amazing. I'm trying not to think about how I'm not going to be at the World Fantasy Convention and how I'm not spending Halloween in Providence.
Oh. Jennifer read through a bunch of this journal yesterday, while backing it all up to disk (Blogger has been acting entirely too wonky lately for my liking). She discovered that it's almost as long as Low Red Moon, at more than 96,000 words. I think portions of it will be published along with the limited edition of LRM, but I'm not sure. Digging through and finding That Which Is Interesting will be a chore.
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