A few days ago, the UPS man brought me a parcel all the way from New York – ARCs of the Tor release of Songs of the Earth, which is due out in February 2012.

If you are desperate to get your hands on a copy (which you are, aren’t you?) you will no doubt be pleased to hear that the hardcover is available to pre-order now on Amazon.com. You lucky, lucky people.

And as if that wasn’t enough awesome . . .

Yesterday, our postie-in-a-van brought me another parcel, this time from la belle France: an ARC of Les Chants de la Terre, Tome 1 de La Chasse Sauvage (bet you can’t work out what that means) which Bragelonne will be releasing into the wild on 18 November 2010.

Look closely, and you can even see what the French cover will look like.

I’m not sure that my schoolgirl French, largely unused these past twenty seven-anna-bit years, is up to the task of translating what the lovely Stéphane Marsan of Bragelonne has written on the back,  but I think I can manage Ce livre est un enchantement.

Cor.

Or maybe that should read: c’est formidable!

Doesn’t it look fantastic? The colours are much more muted and subtle than the early snapshots of the cover art led me to expect – so atmospheric, especially with the brass-bound look around the edges.

Flicking through, I discovered that there’s also a lovely script style drop cap on each chapter, which just makes the page, in my opinion. Mynx have done a super job; I couldn’t be more pleased.

The Spanish edition should be up next – I can’t wait!

This is the Big Kahuna, folks – the USA is a huge market for fantasy, and notoriously difficult for a debut to break into. I can’t begin to describe how stoked (and slightly scared) I am, and excited to be working with a publisher of Tor’s calibre.

I have no word on covers or definite release schedules yet, but as soon as I have something I can share, I’ll be sharing it. Now to find something to remove the silly grin plastered all over my face . . .

Oh, and for the benefit of anyone who’s been under a rock/on the back side of the moon/in solitary confinement in some Level 10 slam* for the last couple of years, this is the book I’m talking about:

Go on. Click that play button, you know you wanna.
 

*with or without a horse bit in their mouth

Plus I quite like travelling on the train. EastCoast actually make a reasonable cup of tea, and the shortbread fingers aren’t half bad.

I was also hoping to catch up with a writer friend of mine, Judith Kinghorn, who’d just recently been signed by Headline and was due to be at the Fair at the same time as me. We’d first met on the writers’ site Authonomy, and here we were, almost three years later, both with publishing contracts, both marvelling at our good fortune.

Anyway, I arrived at Kings Cross feeling virtuous because I’d managed to do some work on the way down. After freshening up and abandoning the Huge Blue Holdall of Doom at my hotel, I made my way over to Earls Court.

It’s quite an impressive building, if you’ve not seen it before, with the arc of steps leading up to the numerous glass doors that wink at you rather like teeth in a wide, grinning mouth. You get a little holder for your badge in the foyer, then a chap waves a barcode scanner over your left bosom (or wherever you happen to have pinned said badge) and it’s on into the exhibition space itself.

It’s big. Givvus-a-bag-of-crisps big (if that reference is lost on you, scroll down). Brightly lit, and full of people, and there’s books everywhere. All sorts of books. Cookbooks, kids’ books, thrillers, lad lit, women’s fiction, science fiction, you name it. Book porn, as far as the eye can see.

Whimper.

So I got my bearings, and headed for the Hachette UK stand on Aisle H. Head for HarperCollins’ less-than-subtle signage, visible above the heads of the other stands, and it’s just opposite.

And guess what was the first thing I saw? This.

Oh my sweet furry lord.

So I’m standing there, grinning like a loon, wishing I’d brought the camera instead of my crappy old mobile, and it hit me. That’s my book. This is really happening.

Continuing to gawk like a country mouse on her first trip to the Big City, I took a turn around the very smart stand and admired the manor-house-drawing-room styling. Round the far side I found the meeting area, and there was my editor, Gillian Redfearn, who found me a seat and a cup of tea. Over the course of the afternoon I met pretty much the whole rights team, said hello to some old acquaintances, and played text message tag with Judith until she escaped from her various appointments and we were able to meet at last (she’s lovely, and she writes beautifully atmospheric historical fiction).

Sadly, my Dutch publisher was unable to join us for drinks, but we chatted for a while as Day 2 of the Fair wound down, before we collected Stephane and Alain from Bragelonne (my French publishers) and headed off to the pub, where we were joined by Sacha from Heyne and José from Planeta (Germany and Spain respectively). We then ate well, drank well, and laughed much. I seem to remember discussing some sort of pan-European book tour/road trip/pub crawl, but that could have been the beer talking . . .

José also brought me this beautiful boxed proof of the Spanish edition of my book, which is how Planeta are sending them out to the trade. It’s utterly gorgeous: the statue and the ivy are varnished so they shine out from the matt box. You expect to find expensive chocolates inside, or something equally precious. I’ve certainly never seen anything like it before.  The photos don’t do it justice.

On Wednesday I had lunch with my old acquiring editor, Jo Fletcher, pretty much the grande dame of UK genre publishing, who brought me to Gollancz in the first place. It was wonderful to catch up with her; just a real shame we both had to dash off before we got to the bottom of the bottle of wine, her back to the Fair and me to Kings Cross to catch my train home.

The reality of being an almost-published author (63 days to go, not that I’m counting or anything) still hasn’t quite sunk in, but I will admit to feeling a bit more like one now.

——–

McEwan’s Best Scotch TV advert from some 25+ years ago. I’ve scoured YouTube but I can’t find it, which is a shame, because it doesn’t really work in text. Scene: interior, pub, barmaid is pulling a pint of the aforesaid ale (tagline: the one you’ve got to come back for) for a customer recently returned from Germany.

Barmaid: “So how was Munich?”

Customer: “Big.”

“How was the beer festival?”

“Massive.”

<Meaningful pause as she tops off his pint> “And how were the lasses?”

<Cut to flashback of hefty Oktoberfest fräulein> “Oh, give us a bag of crisps.”

Fantastic lots, many of them pure unobtainium, including critiques, artwork, stuff signed by really cool people like Neil Gaiman and Joe Abercrombie, your name in a book, Stephen Deas to do with as you will (more or less) for two whole days,  . . . and personalised ARCs of M D Lachlan‘s Fenrir and Songs of the Earth from, er, me.

If you’re a writer, a reader, connected with genre publishing or just a fan, you should check this out. Follow @GenreforJapan on Twitter or visit the website, and get browsing, get donating, get involved.

And get your bloody wallet out!

Judge for yourself, over at the Wertzone. I’ll wait.

. . .

. . .

[whistles tunelessly]

. . .

. . .

Ah, you’re back. Well? What did you think?

Solid, I thought. Very fair. Well pleased with the liberal use of “intriguingly” and “subtle” and “interesting”, and the lack of words like “dull” and “predictable” and “unconvincing”.

Cheers, Adam. The cheque’s in the post.

I can’t believe my eyes – I must be dreaming… — Jack Skellington

A parcel just arrived here at Cooper Towers. A thick, heavy parcel, bound in sticky tape and bearing the blazon of none other than Orion Books.

So, naturally, I opened it – or tried to. Application of fingernails, scissors and finally brute strength was required (I don’t know where Orion gets their Sellotape, but this is definitely not regulation Sellotape, being fiendishly sticky and stubbornly durable).

Eventually, the ungodly stuff was overcome, and the parcel disgorged this:

Yup, the page proofs for Songs of the Earth just thudded onto my desk. Ooh. Exciting.

Now I get to read my book for the umpteenth time, looking for errors, misspellings, infelicitous word-choices etc – though hopefully I’ve already eliminated most of the outright clunkers by now, leaving only my prose, to stand or fall on its own merits.

It looks lovely, by the way. Absolutely lovely, like a child in its christening robes, all white and perfect. Sniffle.

Sorry, I seem to have got something in my eye.

There’s white things in the air — Jack Skellington

Songs of the Earth is now manifest in physical form, and doesn’t it look pretty, all shiny and clean, ready to be launched into the big bad world to be variously picked apart, analysed, sneered at, reviewed, raved about, blogged over and ignored. Gulp.

I feel like a mother on Junior’s first day of school. Proud, and slightly nervous, smiling brightly and waving goodbye with an emergency hankie or two stuffed up my sleeve.

Actually, scratch that. Junior’s got rather more to worry about than a wedgie and having his lunch money stolen. Some of those reviewers can be downright merciless; it would be an entirely fitting allusion to say I feel like a gladiator’s mum before his first bout, having just walked through the armoury and past the wild-animal enclosure with the screams from the infirmary ringing in my ears.

Still, I’ve done my best, and he’s on his own now. I’ll be proud of him whatever happens. Go get ‘em, kid.

Hang about in any writer’s community, be it online or in the real world, and sooner or later you will encounter a manifestation of this phenomenon. It happens with the inevitability of Godwin’s Law: just as every Internet argument will devolve into accusations of Nazism, so every place where unpublished writers gather together will throw up one of the following gems.

Editors are eeeevil

No, they’re not. They’re human beings, not the spawn of the pit. They are professional word-wranglers and it is their job to improve your work. They’re like Berocca for your book: it’s you on your best day, only better.

They’ll hack my work to pieces

No, they won’t.  Seriously, if it needs that much work, there’s little chance the publisher would have laid out money for it in the first place unless you’re a 21 year old celebrity with a sensational autobiography who can’t write worth a damn.

What an editor does is apply polish.  No matter how shiny you think your manuscript is, it’s a fact that we all make mistakes, or aren’t quite as clear as we could be. The editor will smooth out the sentence structure, weed out repetition or overwriting and then wrap it all up in house style. You should barely be able to see where they’ve been, but read the book afterwards and you’ll be amazed at your literary genius all over again.

But I’ve got no say over the changes they make

Wrong again. Your editor will send you a copy of your manuscript with all the changes in it, and you get to approve pretty much every comma, deletion and rewording they’ve done.

The editor will have a damn good reason for every change they make. Maybe what you wrote was ungrammatical, repetitious or inane. Maybe it was a poor analogy, or you’re overusing a word.  People do stuff like nod and shrug all the time, for instance, but in books nods and shrugs are, to quote my editor, “heinously overused”.

So it follows that if you want to alter something the editor has done, you must justify it. If your justification is good, you’ll probably get your way, but you’ll have to give a little to get a little. You can’t just snap and snarl like a terrier with a chew-toy it doesn’t want to give up, clicking “Reject change” on everything, and expect to be taken seriously.  That is the mark of an amateur, or the kind of pain-in-the-ass author that nobody wants to work with. Get over yourself and start acting like a professional.

Belief in your ability to write is essential in this business, but you also need a healthy dose of humility. Nobody’s prose is so golden that it is beyond improvement. Nobody’s – not even God’s (read the Bible and you’ll see what I mean; if He’d had a decent copy-editor there wouldn’t be all those long lists of begats in the Old Testament).

But seriously, when the edit is complete, and you read your book through with “Track changes” set to “Final” so you can’t actually see what the editor’s done, you probably won’t want to change very much at all.