Tag: editing

Elvis has left the Concert Hall

Or: Service Station Sandwiches, Ninety Stairs and an Aldi Grail Quest

First, a confession. If you’ve been waiting on tenterhooks for my last post about the Spirit and her glorious showers, it turns out my phone decided to publish it as a draft. As a draft. It sat there, finished and polished and visible to precisely no one, while I went about my week believing I’d shared my thoughts with the world. So if it pops up now, that’s why. Technology, like the Strait, does what it wants.

Anyway. The drive up was fine. Eighteen hours is eighteen hours, and there’s not much you can do to dress it up, but we did our best with an endless parade of service station sandwiches. I now consider myself something of an authority on the genre. There’s the egg and lettuce that has clearly been through things. There’s the ham and cheese that tastes faintly of its plastic triangle. And there’s the chicken and mayonnaise that you approach with hope and leave with regret. I steered clear of all of them. I stuck, loyally and without exception, to the roast beef, cheese and relish. It’s a little fancy for a servo, I grant you, practically fine dining by fuel-stop standards, but that’s not why I chose it. I chose it because the relish hides a multitude of sins. Whatever the beef has been through, whatever the cheese has seen, the relish covers it all with a sweet, tangy blanket of forgiveness. Eighteen hours, umpteen servos, one sandwich. I regret nothing.

We rolled into the aunt’s at four in the morning, which is not so much an arrival time as a cry for help. We slept until midday, then lounged about in that pleasant, slightly stunned way you do after a very long drive, until it was time for the main event.

The main event was an Elvis tribute concert. The aunt was going with her two sisters, one of their husbands and the other one’s daughter, and Jo and I were promoted to official chauffeurs. Let me set the scene with one statistic: the average age in that room was about eighty-two. Possibly higher. These were people who saw the actual Elvis the first time round and had firm opinions about whether this one measured up.

And they had dressed for the occasion. Oh, how they had dressed. The men had sideburns, proper ones, and every one of those sideburns had clearly been silver-white that morning before being treated to a generous application of black shoe polish. You could tell. You could always tell. There’s a particular flat, matte, boot-cupboard black that no hair has ever grown naturally, and it was everywhere. The women, meanwhile, had gone in hard on the sparkle. Sequins, diamantés, glitter, lamé. Any one of them could have been hung from the ceiling and used as a disco ball, and the room would have been adequately lit. And to a person, not one of them was wearing anything that matched. Not a single coordinated outfit in the building. Leopard print met paisley. Gold lamé met a floral cardigan. Somebody’s sequinned top was having a frank disagreement with somebody’s tartan trousers. It was glorious. It was a room full of people who’d stopped worrying what anyone thought about forty years ago, and honestly, I’ve never been more jealous.

The venue, in its wisdom, had a grand staircase between the showroom and the floor level. Ninety stairs. Ninety. For an audience with an average age of eighty-two. I can only imagine the meeting where someone approved that. The disabled lift, bless it, worked harder that night than any of the performers. Up and down, up and down, carrying its precious cargo of hip replacements and handbags. If there’s an award for the evening’s hardest worker, I’m nominating the lift.

I’m told a good time was had by all. I can’t confirm this myself, as my role ended at the door, but nobody came home complaining, which for that particular crowd is a glowing review.

Saturday was given over to a quest. Somewhere out there in the Aldi Special Buys universe there exists an electric eight-in-one barbecue, steamer, smoker and, honestly, I’ve forgotten the other five things it does. Possibly it does your taxes. Possibly it walks the dog. All I know is that I hadn’t been able to get my hands on one, and I spent a good chunk of the day tracking one down. There’s a particular kind of determination that comes over a person when an appliance has been denied to them, and I had it in spades. Did I need a machine that does eight things? Probably not. Did I want one? With every fibre of my being.

In between appliance hunting, I had lunch with my brother and his two spawn, aged twelve and eleven. They’re at that lovely age where they’re still happy to sit with the grown-ups but are starting to be very much their own people, full of opinions and theories and stories that go on a bit. And then, somewhere between lunch and dessert, one of them said, quite plainly, that they don’t see me enough. I’m not ashamed to say it nearly undid me. Kids have a way of saying the truest thing in the room without any fuss at all, and then going back to their chips. I’m still thinking about it. I think I’ll be thinking about it for a while.

Then yesterday I flew home on Virgin, leaving Jo behind to be the good and useful one for the month. It was a lovely flight, smooth and on time, with the bonus entertainment of my seatmate, who was some sort of influencer. She spent the whole flight either making videos or meditating, switching between the two with impressive ease. Serene one minute, talking brightly into her phone the next.

Meanwhile, in the seat beside her, I was editing M/M erotica.

I have no idea whether she glanced over. I like to think that if she did, she simply added it to her meditation, breathed in, breathed out, and let it go. Either way, I hope I gave her something to think about between takes. It’s the least I could do.

And now I’m home. The cats have been informed. Judging by the looks I’m getting, they’re still considering whether to forgive me. The bull hasn’t noticed I was gone, which is either a compliment to the house-sitting arrangements or an insult to me, and I’m choosing not to find out which.

It’s good to be back. Now, about that barbecue.

— Suzy

In Which I Murder Two Mice in a Single Week (and Other Tales from the Editing Trenches)

I have killed two mice this week.

Not the furry kind — although given that I live in rural Tasmania with fifteen cats, that particular tally is considerably higher and I accept no responsibility for it. I mean the small plastic kind. The kind with the little scroll wheel that is, as it turns out, not built to survive the editing habits of a romance novelist in the middle of a manuscript crisis.

The scroll wheel went first. Then the clicks became increasingly non-committal, the kind of performance where the mouse would technically register the click but in a way that suggested it was doing so under duress. And then, on mouse number two, I watched the scroll wheel spin freely and uselessly like a tiny hamster wheel that had seen things it could not unsee, and I knew it was over.

Two mice. One week.

In my defence, I have been editing.

Not in a pleasant, let’s-refine-the-prose kind of way. I mean deep-trench, where-did-that-paragraph-go, I-know-I-wrote-this-scene-but-I-cannot-locate-it-in-any-of-the-seventeen-iterations-of-this-document kind of editing. Some of my current manuscripts are on their fifth or sixth pass. What that means in practice is that I have taken scenes out and put them back in. I have moved chapters around like furniture in a room I’m never satisfied with. I have cut a beautiful paragraph because it slowed the pacing, grieved it, come back three days later and pasted it into a different chapter, realised it didn’t work there either, and the paragraph now lives in a document called good_bits_dont_delete.docx along with seventy-three other orphans.

The scroll wheel is the victim of all this frantic up-and-down-the-document activity. The endless hunting. The it was here a minute ago. The scrolling up to check a character’s eye colour because I’ve used three different shades across six drafts and I cannot be trusted with continuity.

Here is what nobody tells you about being deep in multiple series simultaneously: the books start to blur. Not in terms of characters — I know my characters the way I know my cats, which is to say completely and with great fondness and an awareness of exactly which ones will cause problems — but in terms of where things are. Which version has the scene. Which draft kept the subplot. Whether that line of dialogue was cut for length or moved to a later chapter or exists only in the document called backup_backup_REAL_backup_FINAL.docx.

The mice are paying the price for this structural chaos.

I have ordered replacements. Possibly two, on the theory that I might as well accept who I am as a person and an editor and plan accordingly. I am also looking, somewhat desperately, into better document management — because while I love the chaos of a novel in progress, the chaos of losing a novel inside itself is a different and less romantic experience.

If you’re a fellow writer who has also achieved the impressive feat of scrolling a mouse into an early grave, I would love to know I’m not alone. And if you have a genuinely foolproof system for tracking what you’ve moved, cut, or buried alive in a miscellaneous document — please, for the sake of the mice, tell me about it in the comments.

The cats, at least, are fine. Thriving, even. Possibly because they do not edit.

Suzy is a romance novelist writing as Bella Bruce, Avery Beckett, and KS Buckley. She lives in rural Tasmania with fifteen cats and an increasingly unreasonable number of half-finished manuscripts. She also runs Of Fables and Fantasies, a wandering mobile bookshop.