I heard from Jen at Salt that the collection has gone to the typesetters.
It's going to be a real live BOOK!! Or at least, the proofs of a real book.
But how do I feel? A bit scared. A bit as though I have just left a much loved son at university, and am driving home with an empty passenger seat.
They are my words, and most have had validation through various means. But putting them all together is somewhat exposing, I find. I feel a bit naked, too.
But Salt continues to be great.
Jen has taken out another story that didn't 'fit'. I trust her judgement implicitly. And also, we've been discussing the beginning of yet another story; whether the reader needed a little more or maybe a little less information up front to make the journey flow more compellingly.
Jen cracked it by adding one simple thing. Not a paragraph. Not a sentence. Not a phrase. Not a word. But a single question mark. It just flips a light on.
V makes a mental note: the power of punctuation...
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2 comments:
Gosh, it's great to hear that your experience with Salt is so positive! And I am not surprised you are scared. Now that Salt books are going to be stocked in Waterstones and Borders, this thing is really, really real! But a writer said a beautiful thing to me the other day. She said: "there's an incredible dialogue you enter into with writers - dead and alive - when you've got an actual book out there." That really moved me. Nice, eh?
That's a thought, isn't it, the 'dialogue' bit. I'm not entirely sure I get what she meant... it's not a two way thing after all.
I'd see it as being part of a continuum... another small filament on a never-ending rope. And my filament starts with writers like Sebald and Carver, and it's tough enough to be part of the rope! Im that excited!
But. Staying with the rope analogy... when ropes are used, some filaments come adrift, they are still attached at the end they started, but the rope is covered by little pieces that never went anywhere.. short filaments that just stick out of the rope and wave hopelessly.
The next challenge is to ensure that our filaments stay within the weave.
V
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