First advance check arrived. Not too shabby for an alter cocker. I think the hourly wage works out to something around what I used to make washing dishes at Buddy Beak’s Baysite (adjusted for inflation). But still…yowza.
Still one more round of edits to go, but it keeps getting better and better. Another month and the book will be off to ARCville.
Good stuff, too. The deleted pages are in a messy pile on my office floor. It’s time to go lean. If I went back to earlier drafts I’m sure I could find a great bloopers reel worth of hilarious typos and awful sentences. Too bad this isn’t a movie. I’d be all ready for the bonus material section of the DVD. I should be done with all my edits in a week. Then back to Penguin it goes.
Novels are works of imagination and I tend to hate novels where there is a heavy emphasis on details accumulated through pre-novel-writing research. Where’s the magic in that? But if you have a parrot in a novel, I figure you ought to study parrots. I do have a parrot in The Mathematician’s Shiva, Pascha. This is who Pascha is based on personality-wise. Her name is Obi and she lives in Portola Valley, CA. Her owners are delightful people who are very affectionate with their birds. Now tell me true, isn’t she gorgeous?
Time to conjure up my narrator, bring back the Slavic accent, remember all those feisty, acerbic, maniacally energetic people of my childhood, and go into character for the next three weeks. I kind of missed him.
Just in time for my birthday, lucky me. Probably a slimmer and toned Math Shiva. Like it’s been going to the gym every day. Which reminds me….
To Penguin Press. The title as of now is The Mathematician’s Shiva. What’s it about? A genius, educated in Soviet Russia and living in Madison, Wisconsin, dies. Her family and a group of emigre mathematicians who idolize her descend upon her funeral and stay for her shiva. The result is delightful chaos. There’s math, Yiddish, Polish, Russian and Hebrew. I decided to be nice and include some English as well. It will be published sometime in the fall of 2014.
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