Light me up!
Why do I feel as though every blog post has to have some punny or referency title, insofar as that’s possible? “Light me up!”?? Why, Jarzab, why?
Anyway, look what I got in an email yesterday from my editor!
That’s a photo of the cover of All Unquiet Things made into a light box for the Random House booth at the Frankfurt Book Fair last month. Cool, right? (They were setting up when this photo was taken, which is why there are no books on the shelves.) It was so cool of RH to do this, and thanks must go out to sub rights for taking the picture-and my editor for sending it to me.
How’s the book going, you ask? Fine. I’m over 200 pages now, which is what we call progress. I’m also doing something which feels stupid to me now because it’s distracting me from the actual writing of this novel, but will feel smart to me six months from now when I’m revising-I’m writing a short story from the perspective of another character that takes elements of the novel-in-progress and explores them in greater depth than would be natural for the novel-in-progress (this is CH, by the way) given the narrative structure and point of view from which it’s told.
Reasons why this is stupid:
- I’m busy.
- I can only write one thing at a time, so every minute spent writing TGITW (which is the abbreviated title of the short story) is a minute not spent writing CH.
- I’ve imposed a deadline of November 30 on myself w/r/t CH because I will probably get my MB editorial letter this month and because MB was rougher when it went to my editor than AUT was, and it took many months to get AUT to the place where it is now, it will probably take many more months to get MB to the finish line, and I don’t want to leave CH almost-done until February or whatever. No wounded soldiers!
- November 30th is not very far away and there are other things that will probably suck up my time, including but not limited to AUT promotion (such as it is/will be), apartment hunting and moving, Thanksgiving, and my job. I guess that’s a longer way of saying the first thing.
Reasons why this is smart:
- The whole point of writing TGITW is to allow me to have a conversation with a character in CH that I’m still, for some reason, not entirely capable of understanding at this point in the process of writing the novel. I’m hoping that this will change when I’m done with TGITW. I know that TGITW is basically a more sophisticated (in intent, perhaps not in execution) version of the character manifestos which made AUT’s characters so real (in my opinion). So I know from experience that this type of writing is going to help me get into the mind of my character, and I will be grateful to myself later when I am on more solid footing with her.
- Extra content for the website! Except, not for, like, ever. This book isn’t even contracted yet, and TGITW would be total spoiler territory, so it’ll be a while. But still! The me of three years from now will thank the me of today.
In a semi-related note, I think it’s about time I started rolling out some more hidden content. It’s been a while since the last time we added a doll to the site. I’ve got a couple of things up my sleeve, so be sure to check back over the next few months. I’ve also got this ridiculous plan where I will post the character manifesto for the killer in AUT, but it will be password protected, so I’ve got to talk to Eric about how we’re going to do that. It probably won’t go up until the book’s been out for a while, though. Still, I think it’s a pretty cool idea.
Originally published at AnnaJarzab.com