Distant Brown Haze

Clockwork Heart

The winds weren’t as wild last night, although they kicked up again come sunup and are tossing the trees back and forth this morning. The smoke isn’t as bad, either, although there’s a distant brown haze over the hills. Of course, I’m fairly north of most of the fires, here in Camarillo, so it’s quite possible that the wind is simply blowing the smoke in the opposite direction.

I’ve chosen to stay home and indoors today. I have film essays, film analysis papers, and India research topic proposals to grade, and a paper abstract to write that must be turned in by tomorrow if I intend to try to get to Australia next July for “Japanese Transnational Fandoms and Female Consumers” at the University of Wollongong, but it’s the thick stack of pages in front of me that I am going to concentrate on — my final edit on Clockwork Heart. For which, I’m glad to say, the advance check came yesterday.

Paula asked me to differentiate between the speech patterns of various castes, which I’m putting off for now. It makes sense, and I’ve practiced differentiating between speech patterns in my Cislunar quartet, but before I can do it, I have to work out some notable linguistic variations. I’m quite good with, say, the thieve’s cant Grinner uses in The King’s Monster, but that doesn’t feel quite appropriate for this particular fantasy setting. She said I did fine with foreign speech — my experience living in Italy helped, there, as I knew which words and problems foreigners are most likely to have with a strange language.

She wants me to tighten part of the MS that she thinks slows down too much; I haven’t gotten there yet, but I suspect I know the area she’s discussing. Not sure what to do. Maybe I can drop an alligator through the transom, eh?

I have to clarify a landlady’s motivation. Easy enough. Paula would prefer I don’t use “coffee” because it sounds too modern/real-world, so I guess I’m back to tea. That’s a drag, because I liked the Habermasian public-sphere import of referring to coffee and coffeehouses in a burgeoning modern society. “Tearooms” just don’t carry the same modern connotation. And I suspect referring to chai would get the same “too modern” reaction. Oh well. As I told my copyediting students on Monday, the proper response to such editorial suggestions is “yes ma’am, may I have another?” She also pointed out a handful of gestures and words that recur too often and need to be weeded out. Glad she caught them; that’s good editing.

So, it’s all do-able. But as I read, of course, I find myself fixing an awkward phrase here, adding a sensory detail there … I’m correcting with pencil on paper right now. I also caught myself in a clothing inconsistency in one scene, so that’s good; I hate that kind of thing!

drupagliassotti @ October 23, 2007