The slush is building up around my desk and I'm swithering about the best way to deal with it. Reject it all now and ensure that the recipients of the standard letter have a miserable Christmas, or wait until January and kick off their new year to a dejected start? I can't bear to do either so I leave them; survivors - for now - of the purge that sweeps the office as old manuscripts burst out of their perished elastic bands like fat men from their belts after eating a good meal, and a ticker tape parade of post it notes flutter around the office before meeting their dark fate inside a hundred oily black plastic bags. I'm wearing my bookbinding apron, usually bristling with paste brushes and hammers and bone folders and scalpels, which I often forget to retract and end up stabbing myself in the guts as I bend, but today there are only scissors as I do the opposite activity and disembowel old proof copies from their utilitarian paper covers, ripping the spines out of them like gutted fish before tossing them with their brothers into garbage sacks.
During a brief moment of inattentiveness when an unsuspecting Chief stepped out of his office for a quiet contemplative smoke on the Marlborough pipe of peace, three of us swooped into his room like Charlie's Angels, with Pledge, Air Freshener and Insect Repellent at the ready, and slowly, slowly began transforming it from a teenage bedroom, complete with stuffed animals, CDs, clothes and teetering ziggaurats of crap into a bastion of literary genius, fortified by towers of orderly manuscripts at various stages of the editing process. I resist the urge to alphabetise them. He's off on holiday next week. That OCD pleasure can wait.
Ah the glamour of working for a publishing house with 'a world-wide reputation for quality, originality and breadth'... especially when that work involves a duster.
I'm going to my literary friend's Christmas drinks' party tonight and I can only imagine the conversations I might have with her other guests who, last year, might as well have been talking to me in clicks for all the sense I made of it. While they talk about their latest scholarly tomes, all I can offer in exchange is a description of my day at the office cleaning out shelves and collecting printer cartridges abandoned on high shelves and stuck down the back of radiators.
...well, unless I mention my finished copies which arrived today, and the staggeringly large order put in by a high-street supermarket that so surprised me I almost had to ring my editor back and check I hadn't misheard.
This is the life of a published author: The book for which you've waited three years and most of your life comes in all its spot-varnished, embossed glory, exactly as it is going to look in the bookshops, a real actual thing, and you look at it and think...
Um.
Now what?
The Indians gather round and whoop and I'm bloody glad I have them to cheer because, in truth, I feel a bit numb as I look at the cover with my name picked out in pink metallic lettering. So much has happened over the past two years, and little of it has been good. At another time I would have gone home and called my husband in from his study and we would have celebrated, but the study is empty, just a bare desk that I have pitifully tried to colonise with all my art materials but can't bring myself to use. The dedication that I wrote before he left, crossed out and reinstated is there on the first page of the book, but he's not. Instead there's a clone of him who walks and talks just like the old husband but seems to have been programmed with stock answers instead of speech, and silence instead of emotions.
And so I can only be grateful that rather than going home to the horrible anticlimax, I'm going to put on my slutty dress and go to a party where I'll know nobody apart from the people serving drinks, my box of brand, spanking new novels stored under the desk with three pairs of shoes and the world's largest ball of twine, 50 light bulbs and a box of padded envelopes - just bits of paper, held together with glue and optimism, and not, after all, the answer to all your prayers.
I sign a copy for Mr T and leave it amongst the other coals on the Newcastle of his desk. He comes in, finds it, exclaims, strides forth from his office holding the book, and as I walk forward for his congratulatory hug there's the sound of sniper fire or anti-aircraft guns (both of which I've actually flinched from in my time) pop pop pop pop pop, exploding at my feet. The sound of dreams, illusions and joyful expectations bursting?
Don't be daft. I'm not that mawkish. It's just the bubble wrap that has fallen out of the box.
