2P

Or not 2P (just kidding -- of course I'm going 2P) (now with travel photos!!)

I am not done-done with book tour (I am writing this in the lobby of the next event), but I’m done with the night-after-night portion, so I can tell you the most frequently asked question is: How did you come up with such an unhinged topic as a pregnant seventy-seven-year-old¹? But the second most frequently asked question is: What is your (writing) process²?

Short answer (to both): Editing. Longer answer (also to both): Honestly, yes, it’s a little unhinged. Further answer: My process boils down to two things. The first, you will recall, is butt + chair. I show up. I sit down. Then I just keep doing that.

The second — which really is part of the first — is can-kicking. When first I add my butt to my chair, I don’t know where the book is going. I come up with ideas, and they’re terrible. My first draft is unspeakable. So are drafts two through one hundred or so. Then I start fixing things, but there’s so much to fix. Then there become fewer things to fix, but they’re really important and hard to get right. At every point, I am reassuring myself: It’s not good now, but it will be. It’s not right yet, but I’ll fix it later. I’ll fix it later. I’ll fix it later. I’ll fix it later. It’s kicking the can down the road.

And then, one day, you arrive at later. This is after drafting, revising, editing, editing, editing, editing, more editing, copyediting, proofreading, and proofreading the actual proofs. Some people stop there. But my publisher usually lets me do another couple rounds after that. This is called second pass. (And this time I also did third. And fourth.)

By second pass, whose subject line in your email is 2P, there is no later. Any changes at that point mean resetting whole swaths of the book, plus re-copyediting and re-proofreading, and that is expensive and not allowed. By 2P, all you can do is catch typos, insert or delete a comma, maybe change a word if you absolutely must for the sake of clarity only.

It’s hard. One because at that point you can literally recite the book, a state which is not conducive to very close reading and typo-catching. Two because you’ve spent so long (compulsively) editing, and now you aren’t allowed to. Three because the timing isn’t flexible at that point, and sometimes the two weeks they’re giving you to do second pass coincide with your trip to Türkiye.

But it was my very last later. So needs must. Here are some places I did the second pass of Enormous Wings in Türkiye:

I started 2P³ on the (12 hour) plane ride over.

I did 2P on the roof of my hotel in Cappadocia.

I did it during breakfast in Kusadasi overlooking the Aegean Sea.

I did it on a boat as we were leaving Fethiye…

…then docked beneath Simena Castle.

All to say, I definitely felt these guys I met along the way⁴:

To be clear, I am not complaining about having to work on my vacation. In fact, I’m crowing about what a great place this was to get to do this (or any) work. Among other things, it was both inspirational and perspective-lending. I’m not claiming that anyone’s going to be reading Enormous Wings in 2,000 years, but paying this level of attention to later and to getting the details as right as you can feels less like madness when you’re surrounded by examples of texts (and homes for texts⁵) standing the slings and arrows of time.

Probably no one realized anyone was going to read this request for info about textiles and travel garments up there (second pic) 4,000 years later either, but if they had, might they not have sweated a little harder over whether “Pepper said” or “said Pepper” sounded better in any⁶ particular sentence? And if they did, would that not seem an eminently reasonable expenditure of time, all things considered?

As an added bonus, we saw, everywhere, enormous Turkish wings:

Which was, I thought, a very good sign.

For a book recommendation this week, speaking of time, until recently, I had somehow never read E.L.Doctorow’s Ragtime (in fairness, I was two when it came out in 1975), and it is great. It is great on America, race, class, family, and time. It is great on excessive wealth and what bad things happen when some people have all the money and some have none. It is great if you’re thinking about weird ways to structure a novel which shouldn’t work but somehow do.

Its characters are sometimes historical, sometimes not-quite-named, and it’s one of those multi-thread epics except short and strange and unlike, I imagine, most of what you’ve read recently. So: interesting! And very possibly on your shelves already. Highly recommend. If you read it (or have read it already), leave a comment — I’d love to know what you thought.

Sending love and gratitude meantime,
Laurie

1. Subtext: Are you unhinged yourself?

2. Subtext: Is it, like you, unhinged? (Subtext subtext: If I want to write a novel, must I become unhinged myself?)

3. I see how you can read this as “I started to pee on the plane…” which of course is also true but not my point.

4. the latter of whom is endeavoring to train turtles

5. for this last pic below is a 2000-year-old library

6. *every