OUT OF ALL HOOPING

[pameladean]

I have, not exactly in my hand right now, but very near by, and honestly I think I might sleep with it under my pillow, the termination paperwork for The Dubious Hills AND the cancelled and as-yet unpublished sequel to Hills, that is, the work sometimes known as Going North.

This has been imminent for some weeks now and I have been trying to figure out what to do. I will let you guys know as soon as I have.

What I can say is that Going North needs to be re-expanded, not to its former two-volume length, but by perhaps 20,000 words; that probably not all of them will be words that I have already written; and that I am very well, indeed painfully, aware that people have been waiting for far, far too long for this book; so I will do my best to be expeditious.

One might well ask why I didn't do the revisions while I was awaiting the paperwork, but I can only say that they had not come properly into focus, and in fact I needed to write a short story first to get things to line up or clear up or whatever this analogy thinks it is doing just now. I would apologize for my creative process, but that wouldn't make it any less annoying.

Pamela

Comments

[alecaustin.livejournal.com]

I am entirely sympathetic to being unable to do revisions while awaiting the paperwork. I expect the reasons are very different, but I find it very difficult to engage in revisions (which I find very stressful at the best of times) while otherwise anxious or under stress. And your paperwork situation strikes me as precisely the sort of thing that would make me run howling for the hills.

[pameladean]

I often enjoy revisions. However, that book had been revised to death and back again, and I really didn't feel up to dealing with it in any meaningful way.

Stress does make almost everything harder, too, regardless of how difficult it is to begin with. I'm relieved that everyone's first reaction is not, "Hey, you had three years, what were you doing all that time?"

P.