Don’t get me wrong, I do enjoy editing my books, it’s always a great surprise to read something I wrote a couple of months earlier and find it not only makes sense but that one or two sentences actually make me sit up and think ‘Gee, did I write that?!’. But after the second or third edit you start to wish you could rush ahead, search for the cover image, start the Amazon malarky which always seems to have changed since the last book you uploaded and then get to that wonderful pricing page and press ‘Publish’. At that moment I forget about that book and my attention goes 100% to the next which I have already started writing in the coffee house each morning. Of course, the sudden sale of a hundred or so copies on Amazon might bring my attention back to that just finished novel but I wait to see that happen.
In the meantime I entertain myself as best I can while editing. I mentioned previously the podcasts of History Hit, a streaming service. They continue to be of great interest and very informative, not just about the Tudor and Elizabethan period my book is set in, but also on Medieval, Ancient and American history. Sometimes the title of a new podcast can have me exclaiming ‘Oh, no!’ and thinking I will have to go back through earlier broadcasts to find one more interesting. Only to be proved very wrong, of course. When I read the words ‘Transgender fairies…’ at the beginning of a title you might imagine my facial contortions and exclamations. Being a man of many years who recalls cowboy serials, Batman thumping The Joker, Top Cat’s laconic asides, and the original Star Trek, you might excuse my initial lack of political correctness. Well, I listened to ‘Transgender Fairies of Early Modern Literature‘ and…it was darn interesting! Puck, Ariel, etc and learning how fairies changed in their appearance and roles from medieval times into Elizabethan, due largely to the rise of the theatre and the need to ‘show’ fairies through boy actors, and I had my eyes opened to aspects of Shakespeare, in particular, which I had never been aware of before. Yes, (or should that be ‘Yea’, steeped as I am in Elizabethan times), the highly qualified expert seemed incapable of saying a sentence without using the word ‘gender’ but she was extremely knowledgeable and a very fluent speaker. Another podcast on the theme of Shakespeare’s Henry V also opened my eyes to many other themes within that play which I, and I suspect many others, always saw as a pro-war piece of work which could be used by anti-war factions too. If Shakespeare meant all these aspects of his plays, then, boy, what a heck of a writer he was.
To massage my aching brain after all these intellectual discussions I turned to iTunes. Loaded on my PC, I go for months not using it then have a spending spree usually after something in my writing sends me googling a specific genre of music. Hence my obsession some months ago with smooth jazz for my last book. This time I suddenly realised I was missing a lot of my older downloads in my iTunes ‘library’. Annoyed I had been somehow diddled out of my purchases because I had changed my computer, I did eventually explore all the menus within my iTunes and discovered that the songs were all there but were held on a different page and needed to be downloaded again, without cost, to my present library of purchases. So I spent a pleasant morning rediscovering songs I had bought over the last ten years and selecting just some to download again (a very quick operation I must say).
Among the menagerie of tunes was this one, from a phase of discovering dance songs from the clubs, courtesy of a young woman I corresponded with in the late 2000s when I was working partly online for a franchise website. Most of the songs no longer hold my interest but this one does, the relentless beat of the Freemasons and the ethereal voice of the daughter of Judie Tzuke, a singer I recalled from my younger days, one Bailey Tzuke.
And isn’t it strange how our brains work? I spent an afternoon editing one chapter which starts with the main character’s female sidekick donning breeches and doublet despite having another character say earlier that she must never be seen in such an outfit outside of the theatre (long story…). Later in the same chapter she is mistaken for being the narrator’s ‘escort’, despite still disguised as a young man, and goes into a tavern with no query of her odd appearance. I seemed to have completely forgotten what she was wearing and completely missed it all again during the edit! Then, about five hours later as I sat watching TV, it suddenly came into my head what I had done. Quite crazy. So, upstairs I shot, scribbled down the error needing to be fixed, and corrected it the next day. It makes me wonder what other gaffes I have overlooked…
Jamie Neve 