Good morning and thank you SO MUCH for the congrats under Thursday’s post about finishing my book. I rudely haven’t replied to them yet because we started on the edit-edit yesterday morning - it goes to copy edit on Tuesday - meaning it’s not quite Trotters Up yet.
(I hate the revolting idea of feet as trotters, but I can’t stop saying Trotters Up. I learned it years ago from Danny Dyer and it’s stuck in my head ever since. ‘Trotters Up, very nice,’ I say passively-aggressively to anyone relaxing while I’m trying to do stuff. ‘No, absolutely, Trotters Up, I’ll just hoover round you’).
The speedy edit and then the whizzing to the copy editor is what happens when your book is out in the autumn and you deliver it in May, largely because you so love writing your Substack that you keep nipping off and doing that when you should be concentrating fully on the matter at hand.
But I write pretty clean copy - I was a sub-editor for years, which helps - so while I may not always deliver my manuscripts on the dot, my sentences are usually okay by the time I’m done. Hence the editing speed. (God, wouldn’t it be awful if I jinxed myself by BOASTING about this on here and my ms was in fact a disaster? No one likes a braggart).
Anyway - because of all this, I have no links for you this week. Aside from Lucinda on Monday, I haven’t really concentrated on anything other than my own words during this last push. I haven’t been anywhere - I don’t think I’ve actually left the house - and I haven’t cooked a single thing that wasn’t eggs on toast or instant noodles (these and their siblings, so good).
So rather than scrabble around looking for emergency things to link to, I thought I’d show paid subscribers a completely candid, untidied, unstyled, annotated picture of my desk yesterday afternoon.
The light was lovely and I thought that you might conceivably like to see where I write to you from. Also I wanted to contrast the Pinterest version of being a writer 🙄 with the reality.
For me writing books involves typing until my eyes go funny, having brief breaks to pee and rehydrate, and then starting again. For months on end. Years, sometimes. All by myself. Every day. While also having to do all the normal life things, like tend to family and relationships and animals and make dinner and take out the bins.
There is no aesthetic. There are no wistful, dreamy facial expressions. No wafting, would you believe. No sitting having big thoughts in scenic cafés wearing a t-shirt that says WRITER. It’s hardly going down the mines - it’s not even being on your feet all day - but anyone who earns their living by writing full-time works like a donkey and just gets on with it. Also according to the Society of Authors, in 2022 the median income for a full-time author in the UK was £7,000, which is $9,000 and a bit. So let’s not romanticise it too much.
I think I’ve made the picture huge for the web version, but if not you might need to click on it to see properly. I started doing arrows but it looked even more chaotic, so I stopped. Excuse the dust.