RIP and WIP

I’m all done with copy edits on Rites of Spring (Break). The next time I see it, it will look like a book, not a manuscript. Which doesn’t mean the work is done, but first proofs are always so…. final-looking to me. According to a lot of book contracts (mine, certainly), after your book has been typeset, if you make changes that affect a certain percentage of the manuscript (that aren’t typesetting errors), you get charged. Usually, the only marks I make on my first pass pages are to check typos or last minute clarifications, etc. A few times I’ve added a line or two because, at the last minute, I dreamt up a joke that was too funny not to include. But I try to get all my last-minute changes in at copyediting, before we get to the first pass.

In other news, I leave for Europe in three days. I’m having a tough time believing this, because the past week has been so busy! Tomorrow, SB and I kick into high gear in our final planning stages. I will make him start packing. I swear. I feel very unprepared, but I always get this anxiety before we’re due to head somewhere. I’m also a planner, and he likes to wing it. He did not appreciate the color-coded Excel file I emailed him that explains where we will be going, what we will be doing, and where we will be sleeping during the trip.

In turn, I do not appreciate the boxes of the color-coded Excel file that remain blank and unfilled-in. Especially the boxes that speak of sleeping arrangements in Naples. Dinner I can wing. Beds not so much. And of course, this is never something we worried about in Australia and New Zealand. Have tent, will travel. Also, when you’re spending months abroad, you have all the time in the world to wing it. When you’re doing a whirlwind trip to London and Rome for research, you need to make sure you get done what you went there to do.

Meticulous travel planning aside…

At a lot of holiday events these past few weeks, the topic of my new book has come up. SB and I have our standard answer: “It’s a young adult fantasy about killer unicorns and the virgin descendants of Alexander the Great who hunt them.” I never know how much to talk about my WIP. It’s probably my strongest superstition in writing (because I don’t think I need a particular pen or computer program or cup of tea to write). It’s not that I think someone is going to steal something, though for some reason, that’s always the conclusion that people jump to. It’s that I like to keep things in the darkroom for a while. While the book is still in progress, still in flux, I’m not quite sure what’s a spoiler and what isn’t. I’m not quite sure what’s going to make it in and what’s not. For instance, I thought I knew where my heroine’s first kiss with the love interest was going to take place — nope. Not even close, in either plot point, motivation, location, any of it. I even changed the love interest’s name. There was something in the draft of the book I sold that I had a whole debate with my editor about keeping, and it turns out, in the rewrite, it doesn’t fit!

So how can I go around saying, “The killer unicorn book has warp-speed attack mongooses in it!” and then you are a big lover of mongooses and in fact you run a Mongoose Appreciation Society up in Ottawa, and you get your whole club to run out and buy the book in 2009 only to discover that I had to take the mongooses out. I can’t have Ottawans hate me.

This I know: The book is about killer unicorns. It is about virgins. It is about the descendants of Alexander the Great. The heroine’s name is Astrid. Artemis help me, it had BETTER be set in Rome.

And though I also know hundreds of pages of other things, I can’t really talk about them yet on a blog, because I can’t have those Mongoose People after me.