Jo Treggiari/Feltus Ovalton blog

In my present home we have no attic (just a hot and dirty crawl space under the roof) and only half a basement which is wet or flooded most of the year. The house sits on a massive slab of rock so the water table is uncommonly high. No one really has a dry basement around here.
Anyway, problems with building on bedrock aside, what I really wanted to write about is attics and basements. Aren’t they wonderful!

I grew up with both although the basement was really my father’s domain. He had his own bathroom down there with a shower, and his worktable, tool boxes and the tubing and casks and pungent cakes of yeast he used to make wine.
But the attic! Oh the wonder of it! Only half of it was finished. A small room at the top of a short flight of stairs, with a tiny window at one end which looked out onto an overgrown garden, the roof beams slanted and exposed, and then on the other side, the rafters about ten inches apart and a temporary floor made out of insulating board so brittle that your foot went through if you stepped on it, and nothing except the rough underside of the roof tiles.
We called the small room, the box room because we kept boxes in it. Mostly boring things like papers and documents which had made the trip over from England but there were photos too of my mum’s ancestors and relatives. Sepia-tinged portraits of bearded men in waistcoats holding round-brimmed hats and walking canes, and ladies with cinched in waists and bodices and bustles in their skirts, and sleepy children too still and clean in their pinafores and knee britches to be real kids.
And there were suitcases full of clothes neither of my parents ever wore but were kept anyway. My sister and I played dress-up with them and we made up stories about the people in the pictures and we spent hours in that dusty room at the top of the house.
Eventually the other half of it was finished with a proper floor and the peaked walls and roof roughly plastered and painted white. A normal guest room—but for some reason there was a walkway left behind the walls, a space about two feet wide that went all around the room, and we used to sneak in there and hide and whisper and peek between the tiny gaps left between where one piece of sheetrock ended and another began, and we’d pretend that we were the rats in The Tale of Tom Kitten or the minute people in The Borrowers or Lilliputians from Gulliver’s Travels.

The attic seemed like such a magical place and even as pre-teens and teens it was our favorite spot to hang out with our girl-friends recording made-up songs and advertisements into a primitive tape recorder or re-enacting scenes from our best-loved movies (Grease, The Sound of Music, Escape from Witch Mountain). One of my recurring roles was as Danny Zuko from Grease with my hair slicked back with Vaseline and my collar turned up. The boys had the better songs and the better dances and besides our friend Kate always wanted to be Sandy and wear her mother’s poodle skirt.

But this is about the other room in the attic. The one I still dream about. A room that wasn’t even there except in my imagination but it was so clear and so fabulous in my mind that I could not believe it did not exist. It was similar to the box room which probably added to the realism. The same but different.

There were the slanted walls, the small window at one end although in my dreams this one was made of leaded glass with rectangular hand-blown panes complete with air bubbles and occlusions and a sheen like spilled gasoline, and it looked out onto woods and rolling pastures and a winding, brilliant river. And the air was always fresh as if it had just rained, and there was a sweet, balmy breeze.

And there were boxes and steamer trunks and valises and mahogany wardrobes. And hoop skirts, and pelisses trimmed in swans down, and bowler hats, and sword sticks, and Malacca walking sticks with silver cobra heads, and scrolls, and maps on paper so old it crumbled at the edges, and compasses in brass cases, and clocks with open backs so you could see the gears and pendulums moving, and books with illustrations in bright jewel paints and gold with tissue paper covering the pictures, and exotic leather bindings embossed with swirling patterns and hidden faces, and peacock fans, and stuffed crocodiles, and varnished puffer fish, and wind-up animals that played musical instruments or walked stiff-legged and then fell over sideways, and lead soldiers, and carved chess sets with pieces that looked like faerie queens and goblin kings, and polished chunks of amber with wasps captured inside, and fossilized wood, and giant ammonites, and teeth from the prehistoric megaladon shark as long as a steak knife blade, and bows and arrows with flint heads, and doe skin moccasins and necklaces heavy with bits of bone and brightly colored beads, and cages with sulfur-crested cockatoos.
And a whole lot more.

I loved that room and I spent a lot of time inside and outside of dreams trying to find it again.

I think that room is the reason I love to read and to write children’s books. Adults just don’t have rooms like that.

I received my editor’s notes on May 24th.
Read through them.
Had myself a good cry (both sobs of joy and frustration).
Then I thought about everything she had said for a couple of days.
On May 26th, I sat down at my computer and began at the beginning.
With her notes at hand I started off with the big stuff: mostly shifting scenes to different places which entailed changing everything before and after that scene.
*In my first book (The Curious Misadventures…) I had to move a pivotal scene from the first 1/3 of the book to the last 1/3 of the book. This took a huge amount of effort and time. Hence an outline, and a critical eye, before sitting down to write a manuscript can save you a lot of time later on.
Fortunately with this book I was just adding a chapter about a 1/3 of the way through and 2 scenes mid-way and at the end of the book. Oh, and moving a kiss.
Turns out it’s very important where you place the kiss.
Then there were the smaller points, and line edits and those were easily taken care of.
*Part of the joy of working with an experienced and savvy editor.
I knew going in that even though there were no massive changes to what I had handed in (plot development, pivotal scenes, characters for instance), a prominent rule of revising is that it always takes much longer than you think it’s going to take. It’s easy to hold your manuscript in your hand and see chunks of text and tell yourself that you’ll just move this here, and that there and add in a few sentences to string it all together, and voila! Easy as making a souffle.

But when we write linearly, well, we write linearly. Each word is linked to the next. Each sentence to the next. Each paragraph…
Well you get my meaning.
When you excise a paragraph, you leave a big gap and nothing that follows it makes sense. Sometimes you have to go on re-writing for quite a time before it falls back into place. Or it can become completely unhinged.

The earlier on in the book that you start moving things around, the more work you have to do.
But that’s ok, because most manuscripts need work all the way along.

It’s not like the first half will already be a perfect piece of work and your editor will say “Oh don’t change a word!”.
“I wouldn’t dream of changing anything,” you answer modestly looking at your shoes. *They are very nice shoes, and expensive and probably made in Italy.

I began work on the 26th, and sent it in to my editor on June 11th at 2 pm (E.S.T.).

For the two weeks preceding that I wrote (and ripped my hair out) every day including Sundays for an average of 8-10 hours a day.
My bottom actually became numb. A giant callus my doctor informs me. I bought a big loofah.

The first week was the tedious moving sections around part, and then writing new stuff that was not tripe. The first half of the next week was more writing of the new stuff. I finished that on Tuesday 8th.
At this point I was positive that the entire book was complete and utter TRIPE.
All of it. Even the bits that my editor had said she loved. Not only that but the premise was laughably idiotic, the writing awful, the characters stupid, stiff and inhuman, and I was the worst writer that ever walked the planet.
Fortunately I have felt that way lots of times before.
And Natalie Whipple had just blogged about how every writer has that moment (or hour/day/month) and it meant that you were approaching the end. You can read her blog here.
I kept working.
The next morning I found bits of okayness within the awfulness. I started again at the beginning, examined every word, checked continuity, factual stuff, killed as many of my darlings as I could, inspected the entire book from beginning to end with my shiny editorial eye.
I enjoy this part because once I realized that really there was nothing that could not not be cut, I was able to study my sentences with some detachment. I don’t mean I took out all the flavorful words, and stripped it down to verb/noun sentences, but that I decided where less description was needed, where pacing flagged, where I needed a bit of a pause in the action so everyone inc. reader could catch their breath.
At this point, the writing is its own thing (not something that is attached to me so firmly that when I cut a word, I bleed too).
So I was methodical and pretty ruthless and even so I am sure I missed things that my editor will discover and then we will fix them together. There is nothing that cannot be fixed with work. Sometimes that means that you have to cut everything but one sentence, but if the story you want to tell is important enough to you, you will do just that.
Still, as soon as I hit the ’send’ button, my hands started to shake. This may also have been because most days recently I have forgotten to eat breakfast AND lunch, but I have not forgotten to make a big pot of coffee as soon I fall out of bed.

I am now in the aftermath.
It is a frightening place.
I am reminding myself that at some point you have to shove your book out the door, wave goodbye to it, and then go back in the house where hopefully you have children, a significant other who gives good hugs, a dog with a squooshy nose, and plenty of wine and chocolate.

Any combination of these things will turn the aftermath into a calm, quiet, golden time with hours to just sit and read books by other people.
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