Sunday, October 05, 2003
Addenda:
A. When I write a novel, at the end of a day of writing, I print that day's pages and place them face down in a roughly 8.5"x11.5" cardboard ms. box. Hence, as the days, weeks, months pass and the pages pile up, they do so with the most recent, higher-numbered ones towards the top. Then on the "final" day of writing, I turn the manuscript, so that the title page faces upwards. It has become a pseudo-ritual, turning the manuscript. And it occurred to me yesterday that it's not so different from "rolling the jacket" in vertebrate paleontology. When a bone or skeleton is being removed, it is carefully covered with a sturdy layer of plaster-of-Paris bandages and other reinforcing materials (the jacket) to protect the fossil until it can be prepared in the laboratory. But the jacketing comes after days, weeks, months of excavation. Finally, when the jacket is on and dry and the block has been undercut and pried free of the underlying matrix, the block is rolled. That is, the up side becomes the down side, so that the down side can be jacketed and braced the same way the up side was. "Rolling the block" is a moment of great anxiety, as a flaw in the block or jacket may result in all the contents spilling out of the jacket and subsequent destruction of the fossil upon which so much time has been lavished. Turning the manuscript does not have quite so much attendant anxiety, but it's sort of the same thing, backwards. Except mss. usually weigh only a few pounds, not tons or hundreds of pounds.
B. This afternoon I was "ego surfing" and bumped into the following:
I read Kiernan's Silk a month or two ago, and I liked it much more than Threshold, not that Threshold sucked or anything. Silk is a full length novel, whereas Threshold was more on the lines of a novella-a literary art form that is nearly extinct these days: longer than a short story, but not quite a novel. So from that perspective alone, Silk was more enjoyable simply because there was more of it to enjoy.
I won't name names or say where I found it. After all, this kind soul actually likes my writing, and liked Silk more than Threshold, which is unusual. But I must point something out. It's true that Threshold is a shorter novel than Silk. To be precise, Silk is about about 114,000 words long, while Threshold, is 108,000 words long. A difference of only 6,000 words (about the length of a mediumish short story) or 5.2%. Now, by no means, and by no definition of which I am aware, do novellas weigh in at 108,000 words, nor would the differences in length between these two books be noticeable to most readers, I think. My contracts with Penguin set the minimum length for my novels at 100,000 words (Low Red Moon and Murder of Angels are both quite a bit longer than the first two books I did for Penguin). My point, Threshold is a) not a novella and b) not particularly shorter than Silk. I pondered why the reader had arrived at this conclusion and came up with two likelihoods: a) the reader has no idea what constitutes a novella-length work of fiction and b) was thrown by the trade paperback format of Threshold, which makes it seem "thinner" than the original paperback of Silk (the second likelihood rests on the assumption that the reader read Silk in pb, not tpb, which is valid, given that the message was written prior to the release of Silk in tpb format). The former is only 1.5 cm thick, while the latter is 2.5 cm thick. Also, the paperback of Silk has 353 pp., while the trade paperback of Threshold is 259 pages long. So, format conspires the create the illusion that Silk is considerably longer, indeed almost twice to one-third again as long, as Threshold. To complicate matters (and matters should be complicated whenever possible), the tpb edition of Silk, released last November, is 353 pp. long and about 2.2 cm thick, not at all what would be expected based on the Threshold tpb. The discrepency arises primarly from the fact that the Threshold tpb is 1.5 cm wider and 2.5 cm taller than the Silk tpb. To which I say, pay attention, people. The world ain't so simple as it seems.
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