The last couple of days I’ve been doing scut work on A Writer’s Diary, year one. I had an editorial zoom meeting with Sam the Editor, and we agreed I’d deliver something by Friday.
He wants to get proofs out before Publishing is overwhelmed by Christmas; I want to feel I’ve not wasted the summer. (I always feel I’ve wasted the summer.)
There are currently three main versions of the Diary, although the first draft is a ruin lost in the fog of two years ago. That might remain useful, if I can find it, for plundered stone and architectural principles. Six big black notebooks.
The second Diary is split into two versions: one, in a file on my desktop, and in the servers of the cloud, and on several hard drives I keep not-here, and on Sam’s hard drive, and my agent’s (in an older form); the other, in the thousands of day-by-day emails that have gone out, and on the Substack website, and pieces of it in tweets and on Instagram and Facebook.
The early version I think of as the Moleskine version; the current is the Substack; and the third and future is the Galley Beggar, or the book.
Each of the latest diaries sees the events shifting a day or two, because Saturday January 1st this year isn’t the same as Friday January 1st last year. Other Annuals also take one step to the side — All Souls, my birthday, Hallowe’en. Easter jumps around jumps around.
But in getting the days and the events and the dates lined up for the book, I found myself doing a two-step. The original Moleskine version had aped a leap year, with a February 29th, 366 days not 365. However, that’s not the reason. Whilst making the ruin into something, I added flying buttresses, demolished outbuildings, inserted a door or two, and did some cosmetic work to the stones. Amid bigger movements, December 1st had to became November 31st, unless it mentioned what day of the week it was, in which case...
Skull in hands, staring into the dark acres of his palms, breathing-breathing, the author — why do I do this to myself? I could write a book with Chapter One, Chapter Two…
The next chunk of scut was copying and pasting every separate day into Substack, which only allows this for three months ahead. The second half of December remains free-floating, awaiting the insertion of post dates. The rest will go out automatically.
If I die now, half a month will be someone else’s responsibility. Though, reading it back now, I see I was unsparing, in my exhaustion. I was rough. That’s the part I hope people will like — apart from all the rest of it.
Marjorie — what would she think?