The first proofs came through for As If By Magic this week. These are the preliminarily enquiries from the totally efficient Imogen of questions and quibbles she’s noted before the book goes to the type-setters.
It’s fiddly, nit-picking sort of work and took me a very full day to sort it all out. The questions vary from straightforward enquiries, such as did they have luminous clocks in 1923 (Yes: they were invented by a bloke called Hammer in 1908 and had radium glow-in-the-dark paint on the dial) to clearing up when Mr Nasty Villian was actually dispatched and What’s Where and how many floors a particular building has.
When the proper proofs of “Magic” – the ones that look more or less like the printed book arrive – that’ll be another three or four full days. This is the “invisible” bit of writing, the bit that no-one ever thinks about.
Apparently about ten percent of Britons dream of becoming an author, which means, as there’s about 61 million people in Britain, that’s 6 million, one hundred thousand people who want to write for a living. (To hear my agent, Teresa Chris, talk, you’d think most of them sent their manuscripts to her.) Six million-odd is pretty serious competition. If you’re reading this, perhaps you’d consider becoming a sportsman or woman, a pilot, an astronaut or an events organiser, which are the other dream jobs. Please. Because I have a sneaking suspicion that a fair few of the 6 million-odd thinks writing involves this:
Whereas it’s a bit more like this.
And the money’s sooooo much better in football.
My doctor once brightly told me that her uncle had written a book – well, he hadn’t so much written it exactly, he’d had an idea and he’d “Sent it in”. Who to? Where to? I questioned wildly. Oh, to a publishers. And then what? Well, surely, she said, with every appearance of reason, if they liked it, they’d get someone to write it. They had people to do that, didn’t they?
Er… No.
I broke my toe last night, and that was the fault of Literature. (Books; I ask you. You can’t trust the damn things. I spend my life with them and this is the reward.) I crashed into a book left lying in the hall by a random reader, all of which, after the tumult and the shouting died, so to speak, and I’d stopped hopping about, swearing, reminded me of Young Sarah Byng. Do you know the poem? It’s by Hillaire Belloc and is dead funny. The title tells you more or less what’s going to happen: “Sarah Byng, who could not read and was tossed into a thorny hedge by a Bull.”
Sarah, on her way home across the fields, comes to where,
“A gate securely padlocked, stood, and by its side, a piece of wood, On which was painted plain and full, BEWARE THE VERY FURIOUS BULL. Alas! The young illiterate, went blindly forward to her fate, And ignorantly climbed the gate!”
Sarah gets chased by the bull and tossed into a prickly hedge. The moral of the story is that,
“The lesson was not lost upon The child, who since has always gone a long way round to keep away From signs, whatever they may say, and leaves a padlocked gate alone. Moreover, she has wisely grown, Confirmed in her instinctive guess, That Literature breeds distress.”
And my toe proves it.
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