Squashing Them Mealy Bugs (2 week Update)

Ovidia--every other Tuesday 

It's 2 weeks on from my plant rescue and both the adenium and I are still alive!

Look at all its new shoots!

I think she's decided to live after all. 

We've been finding white crawling things here and there but I've been squishing them with apologetic human guilt (yes, you are a valid part of Nature but you're hurting this plant under my care so as another valid part of Nature I'm squishing you) and lots and lots more green buds and leaves have appeared. Just look!

The life force is strong in this one! I can't wait to see what colour her flowers come out. They could be anything from dark red to pale pink, yellow, pure white or anything in between.

I haven't repotted it yet though, or even bought the good drainage potting mix (thanks to all the recommendations I know what to get, but I really need to get through this round of edits first)

But I think we've pulled through the worst of things.

I'm still doing daily bug checks and am gradually cleaning bug and ant detritus off her trunk and branches. 

And once I find out what colour her flowers are I might even get another adenium to keep her company.

Unfortunately some evil white mites did sneak in, using her as their trojan horse. 

In the last couple of weeks I found them moving in on  my kaffir lime plant and saan choy (slippery veg) but have managed to beat them back.

But aside from damage control, I've not been doing much for my plants or anything, really. Because I'm on my last edit before sending in next year's book. I suspect most people reading this (if you still have time to read) know how this feels! 

And as so often happens despite my best intentions, I've been trying to work in a fairly major last minute plot tweak because I saw something in the book cover design (which I love) that could work so well as a delicious clue to it. And though a small tweak it's leading to a slew of petty but necessary changes.

Between that and the War against the Mealy Bugs, I've been exercising and sleeping less than I'd like. And today I'm missing yoga in order to write this and still get through my day's edits. 

Not smart, I know. And not a complaint. I love all this. Even the grind. And the 'high pressure' is for a short time only.

Missing my yoga practice means missing centring time as well as moving time (reminder: Non attachment means non attachment to non-attachment practice time too, right?) but I'm trying to stay on track in other ways.

I walk up and down the stairs or do sun salutations between editing pomos, keep up with my DuoLingo and read for an hour a day--

though lately even that feels sad because I've been re-reading Wolf Hall in memory of Hilary Mantel and Cold Is The Grave in memory of Peter Robinson.

All the best with your own projects if you're reading this. Small steps while in grind mode add up to giant swathes long term. 

And if we're struggling that means we're alive--which is still a great state to be in! 

Longest Deadline on Earth...Stay Posted!

Sujata Massey

Once again, this is not a typical blogpost. I'm still on deadline--a new one!
I did not realize before I became published is there's not just one deadline per book. There's the deadline to turn in your unedited manuscript. It's followed by a deadline to turn in a completely revised manuscript (completed two weeks ago). And now I'm on a deadline to approve edits to that revised manuscript and add in whole new sentences and paragraphs to clarify points. I've got one week to go through 370 pages--a feat I'm not sure I can accomplish. There will be a deadline later for me to look at the copy edit, with only very minimal alterations allowed, and another chance to look at bound galleys for errors.

Does this sound like creative, inspirational work? You're right, it's not. However,  a well-edited book is so satisfactory. It lasts longer in people's minds than the average novel does. And that's what I want to create.

I have illustrated this brief posting with some dog photographs to make up for the lack of content. My dogs, Charlie the Beagle and Daisy the Chorkie, do not approve of deadlines.  Sure, I'm around the house more than usual--but I'm parked at a table ignoring them.  They disapprove of the attention I'm giving the gray metal box with the funny light on the back. Daisy walks across the laptop sometimes, to prove a point.

Deadlines will be met! I am keeping an eye on the prize and will not let go of my spirits.

Deadline!

Sujata Massey

My comments this week will be my briefest yet. I am on deadline with Book 2 in my Perveen Mistry series. A writer is always working on a book, but there are many times in the early days of a novel that it must be handed back and forth between the author and the publisher. And this process turns the work from private to teamwork, and can create stress.

The first time this particular tale met a deadline was back in February, when I handed in an 80,000-word book about 4 weeks later than planned. My editor wrestled with it and returned it to me in March, at which point I began the big improvement campaign. Most writers don't spend months on a rewrite, like I do. Typically, novelists rewrite in a month or less. But I have learned I'm not the kind of writer who just swaps in a few words.  I delete sentences, create new paragraph after paragraph, and write many more pages. I do plenty of cutting as well. About ten weeks and 20,000 words since the handoff for Book 2, I am elated to be almost through, although I still have a supermarket's worth of names and titles and typos to address. After I submit it, I expect to have to rewrite more bits (but not as much), and then there is the line by line evaluation of the copy-edit, followed by a couple of rounds with galleys. You could say rewriting and editing is a job in itself, but I should have started Book 3 back in February, when I was researching it in India.

Being close to a deadline--or knowing I've just missed it--changes my life. I exercise and cook less, I forgo social events, and worst of all, I SIT for hours. My back is often stiff and there's a permanent dull pain in my unexercised hamstrings. The dogs are becoming too accustomed to having me home, staring at my laptop either at the dining room table, at my desk on the sleeping porch or my study, or on the living room couch. Daisy, pictured above, thinks nothing of walking across the keyboard to make the point that I should pay attention to something else (her).

Deadline is a concept I first met when I was a newspaper journalist. During those years I wrote articles that were conceptualized, researched and written by me and edited by someone else in the same eight-hour time span. The story would be printed in the next day's paper. It seemed like plenty of pressure, but in hindsight, a 600-word story is not that hard to pull off. Getting the facts straight was the most important part of the journalism process, whereas fiction writing, it is not just facts but expository language, dialogue, and a sense of heart.

People sometimes ask what happens if a writer doesn't meet a deadline. Will you lose the chance to have your book published? The answer typically is no. The book will still come out, but it's likely it will shift to another month to allow time for editing, marketing and printing. If a book is late and the pub month can't be adjusted,  it will be a major challenge for the book's publicity arm to get clean galleys out to critics and the publisher's sales force. That said, back in the 1990s I was with another publisher that suddenly axed a lot of writers with late books, actually demanding they repay their advances. Chief among them were authors who had signed contracts with due dates years earlier that were not met. It seems that turning books in late is a very common thing.

Deadlines are a necessity to keep books coming to the shelves. But serious editors and writers  agree that the quality of the book is the most important factor. A truly exceptional book coming in late is welcomed because it really is that good. However, a bad book arriving on the dot, driven there for fear of being late, hurts everyone involved its publication.

And the reader, too!