Last week, I sent what I thought was the completed draft off to my editor. He sent back notes, and asked me, “Why don’t you ever talk about the actual experience of working on Nemesis?”
“Because I never wrote about it on my website,” I said.
“Well, as a reader, I really miss it not being in the book. You lead up to it, then you reflect upon it, but you left out the actual doing it. I think it needs to be there.”
“Okay,” I said, “it’s going to take a couple of days, though. My memory is a little fuzzy on it, and I’ll have to double-check everything.”
“Great. I look forward to reading it.”
When I worked on the movie, I kept some notes; little one line things like, “security,” and “The Mill,” and “Planet Hell.” They would have jarred my memory had I used them within a few days or even weeks of filming . . . but it’s been almost two years, and they just looked like disconnected words to me. So I got out my script, and my call sheets, and talked with Anne, and read my archived weblog entries . . . and most of my memories came back to me. Some of them were just impressions, (good for talking about, but not writing down,) and others were clear enough to be recollected in the book.
There’s a huge difference between telling my friends, “Patrick was cool,” and recreating for a reader exactly what he did that made him so cool, you know? It’s the difference, Cory Doctorow told me, between showing and telling. “Always show if you have a choice,” he said. (And I’m not name-dropping. Cory gave me great advice which made a huge difference to me as a writer, and I want to give him credit for it. So there.)
So, to get to the point of this story: On Wednesday night, I finally finished Just A Geek. On Thursday morning, I got notes from Brett, and on Thursday afternoon, we sent the manuscript off to O’Reilly’s production department.
I can’t believe that it’s done! There’s this conflicted feeling of relief and sadness that I get when I finish working on a movie or doing a run of a play. The feeling never the same for two projects, but it’s the same . . . wait. It’s like this: It’s never the same flavor, but it’s always the same texture. Does that make sense? I think it does, and I’m actually quite happy with that metaphor. 🙂
See, for the last month, I’ve had a pretty set routine: I get up, I make coffee, I read some e-mail and check up on news, then I write for several hours. I go out of hte house for lunch, then come home and write until I’m out of creative steam. I spend the evenings trying to unwind, but I can’t, because I know that the book has to be finished, so I usually find myself back at the computer working on stuff that I know I’m going to end up rewriting in the morning. Futurama, Family Guy, then sleep for about 7 or 8 hours, and the whole thing starts all over again.
Oh, and this great schedule has resulted in me seriously porking out. I’ve been on a steady diet of fast food and beer for about a month, and I think I’ve gained close to ten pounds. I’m a small guy, so that’s a lot. Watch Screen Savers on Wednesday, and marvel at how fat my double chin is. I think they may give it its own show.
When that schedule was over, I found myself really not knowing what to do . . . so I spent most of yesterday on the couch, watching the second season of Futurama. Normally, I don’t waste an entire day like that, but I think I earned it. I think the intensity of the rewriting process (it was more emotional than I had expected, to recall all the ups and downs of the last few years) finally caught up with me, and I needed to let my brain rest. It was like sitting down after being on my feet for most of a day, and realizing just how tired I was.
So now the weekend is here. Anne’s out of town, the kids are with their dad, and I was supposed to be in Michigan for the awesome Penguicon. Of course, the one weekend in the entire freaking year that I want to be out of town, I get a call that I may be working on a movie, so I had to stay home . . . and I’m not working on the movie. This is why I don’t talk about potential projects any more. It’s a little embarrassing when they don’t pan out. Furstrating as all hell for me, and people who were looking forward to meeting me, too.
Luckily I have found some things to do to keep me occupied this weekend: I went to a They Might Be Giants show with my brother last night (that was awesome and worthy of its own post. I’ll get to that RSN), and I’m going to an art show today. Tomorrow, I’m helping my friend Darin paint at his house, so his baby has a nice room to sleep in when she arrives in a couple of weeks.
That’s it. My coffee is done, and I’m all out of things to talk about for today.
Oh, except for it’s raining right now, and it feels like the rain in Hawai’i, but colder. I’ve written this entire entry with the doors and windows open, so I can hear and smell the rain, and Ferris just shook herself off all over my bathrobe. Yuck. Now I smell like a wet dog.