Brian and I are feeling bear-ish.
We’d like to hibernate for a month or so – maybe until it stops raining. Well,
that might be more than a month if the past three months are anything to go
by. But
- we’re not bears and we can’t just sleep away the grey days. Buster and
Elfie would get up to too much mischief if we did.
I think the faeries are doing a bit
of their own hibernating. Nothing seems “active” at the moment. There are flowers coming up (tentatively) and
the birds are beginning to sing their spring songs, but it still feels
everything is waiting to make that leap into the new. There isn’t any activity
in our house (I’m still talking about faeries here) but perhaps that’s because
they spent a very busy few months helping and hindering us while we finished
the book. I truly believe that they don’t always know if they ARE helping or
hindering. They just do what seems appropriate to them and it may not be at all
appropriate to us. Here’s a good example of what I mean.
I decided (for some foolish reason)
that I would write an afterword for the Faeries’ Tales book - the last double page spread, explaining
where some of the original stories and songs I used came from. Sounds like a
good idea - very grown up and book-ish.
I duly did this and congratulated myself on the fact that I could do it (with
help from Terri Windling and my editors!). I gave the pages to Brian (remember
– this is the last two page spread in the book) and asked him to choose a few
drawings to liven it up for any intrepid reader who ventured all the way to the
very end pages. He did so and we sent it off to the editor for corrections. I hadn’t paid much attention to the drawings
he used, only noting that the very last one looked more than slightly mad. The
page spread was returned with a few things to correct and at this point Brian
said “I just knew this page spread would be trouble”.
We corrected and sent it back. The
memory stick we sent got lost in the post. We sent it again and when it arrived
it was found that we had sent the wrong version of the pages. We sent it via
internet (after all it was only two pages!) and again more corrections came
back -things that no one had spotted
before. We corrected and sent it back. It came back again with yet more and
different corrections. This was bad enough, but every time we tried to correct
the text, it took a different form on the pages. Sometimes it left out
sections, sometimes it changes the format, sometimes it just refused to do
anything.
As we were looking at it on the
computer for what seemed like the hundredth time I said “I feel just like that
little drawing you put in the corner” and Brian confessed that he had put it in
as a joke because he just knew this page spread was going to be trouble and
would drive us crazy. Well - it did. The
faery in the drawing was just doing its job. It had been drawn to be crazy and
it was indeed crazy and very happily going about its business spreading that
craziness around as much as it could. It was far too late to take it out and
replace it with another drawing so we had to make due with a stern talk, trying
to explain to it that it had now done its job and could stop!
We sent the pages off again and so
far we haven’t had them back for any more corrections. I think our editor was
being driven as crazy as we were. We’ll get color corrections for the whole
book back soon. Luckily, that page spread is in black and white - so, what could go wrong? Hah!
And what have we learned from this?
Maybe that what one brings into this world, matters. Brian may still draw crazy
faeries, but he’s going to be much more careful about where they go from now on
(he says that now but he probably won’t do it)!
One last word. Most of the faeries
involved in helping with the book did just that. They helped, inspired and
facilitated. We thank them. Actually, we thank them all, helpful or otherwise.
After all, they’re only doing their job. It’s up to us to be sensible about it!
