First Day of Writing the Sequel to Magic or Madness

The final manuscript of Magic has been approved. It's been copyedited, I've checked (and ranted about) those copyedits. Right now it's being typeset (with little suns and snowflakes as the dingbats). Before too long it'll be a set of bound proofs, otherwise known as Advance Readers' Copies (ARCs) with a gorgeous cover. But it won't be properly published till next March (such a long, long way away) by which time I'm supposed to have finished the sequel.

Last week I met with my editors to talk about the outline for that sequel (so far imaginatively titled Magic or Madness II). The meeting was fun. For hours they asked detailed, smart questions. I answered them, painting a picture of the book that was to be: far more vivid than the outline I'd given them. Their main concern was that it be its own book, that it stand alone, unlike many middle books of trilogies that exist only to serve as a bridge between books one and three. This is my concern too. I hate trilogies like that. I went home, feeling like I'd done a long, long day's work. It felt as though the book was already written.

It isn't. I'm sitting here in alt.coffee, a grungy café inhabited by many other writers with laptops, ready to write it. But there are these two guys sitting nearby talking very loudly about crap ( "I don't feel that I have the energy right now to take that on." "But we could throw in a helicopter bombing a village.") The man next to me keeps sneezing very loudly in my ear (actually it's Scott, but when he sneezes loudly in my ear he is a stranger to me).

I'm hating the music. Tedious Japanese grunge-punk a la the Ramones. I hate the Ramones. I hate tributes to the Ramones and references to the Ramones. I hate the letters that compose the word "Ramones". If I were a wanky French writer I would now write the rest of this musing without using any of those letters.

So far the book looks like this:

Magic or Madness II

Chapter One

The

The "the" was Scott's advice. I told him it wasn't working. "Did you remember to put a space after the 'the'?" he asks. I add a space, stare at the "the" with the space after it, reread the outline, glare at the two blabbermouthed, vile, loud men (what the hell are they doing talking in a coffee shop? This is a place of work!), try to shut my ears to the screeching Japanese Ramones tribute band, and to think about my protagonist and magic and the book that's supposed to be spilling forth from my fingers.

"The first day is always the worst, isn't it?" I ask Scott who mercifully has decided to stop sneezing. He looks up from his extremely fluent sounding typing. He's also writing a sequel, but he's more than twenty thousand words in. So far in he's probably forgotten how hard it is to start a new novel.

"Yeah, " he answers, "sort of. Sometimes the third day's pretty bad too."

"But the first day's the worst, right?"

"Actually, normally the whole first week's rubbish."

Thanks heaps, mate. I bite my nails and realise that because I'm not at home I can't spit them into the waste paper basket. What would happen if I swallow them? Is there a possibility it would inspire me? Would my protagonist swallow her bitten-off fingernails? I go into the bathroom and dispose of them.

So far five people have come in with bleached hair. None of them stay. Of the people sitting in the sofas and chairs leaning over tables writing, reading or annoyingly gasbagging, only two have pierced noses. Three have beards, one has roller blades on, but he just left.

I have no idea how many people in here have tattoos. Two have visible ones: a celtic swirl comes out the top of one bloke's T-shirt and up his neck onto the back of his bald head. Another one has the bottom of a skull peeking out from the sleeve of his sub-commandante Marcos T-shirt. Almost everyone in here is wearing a T-shirt. (Except me.) The others could have tattoos too, hidden ones, swirling around their belly-buttons, over their shoulders, down to the soles of their feet. I have a sudden compulsion to ask them all. Maybe I should put some tattoos in the novel?

There are lots of cakes in the display case. I don't remember there having been so many cakes last time we were here. I'm not hungry, but I wonder if eating cake will give me inspiration. Did Marie Antoinette ever think about writing novels?

I force myself back to the computer screen. The. The what? Strikes me that "the" is not a very useful way to start. USians are altogether too obsessed with the definite article. Afterall they even go to "the" hospital. Too weird.

What about "once upon a time"? Got a long history of starting off stories that one. I give it a go. Not too foul, not too great either, but like Sylvia Kelso told me when I was struggling with my PhD thesis: "you can't edit nothing, but you can edit shit."

It might be shit but that doesn't matter—I'm off. Writing is easy.

New York City, 14 June 2004

P.S. I don't really hate the Ramones.

P.P.S. One of my editors, Eloise Flood, just pointed out that the title Magic or Madness contains all the letters of "Ramones." Spooky!

© 2004 Justine Larbalestier

previous musing next musing

Current Musings Musings Archive