I have spent the last twenty-four hours going through my own book one chapter at a time, looking for damage.
There was some. A merge had gone through the manuscript at some point and quietly rearranged things. Scene breaks had landed in the middle of sentences. Dialogue had been chopped so that a shrug ended up in a different paragraph from the line it belonged to. Two sentences were simply broken — a word missing, a word doubled — and nobody had noticed, including me, for weeks.
That was the easy part.
The hard part was a count.
Fifty times in sixteen chapters, I stop the book to tell you that I am about to be careful.
‘I want to be clear. I want to be precise. I want to be fair. I want that on the record. I have thought about this a great deal.’
Fifty.
Roughly once every eleven hundred words, I lean out of my own story to reassure you that I am not exaggerating.
I know exactly where it comes from. It comes from being seventeen in a hospital and not being believed. It comes from thirty years of being the sensible one. It comes from a woman who has spent her entire working life making sure the evidence is watertight before she opens her mouth, because she learned early what happens when it isn't.
It is also, on the page, a tic.
And worse than a tic, it is a flinch. It is the writer getting to the objection before the reader can.
So they have gone. All but one.
The strange part is what was underneath them. Take away ‘I want to be clear’ and what is left is: ‘It is not stupidity.’ Take away ‘I want that recorded,’ and you get: ‘He tried.’’
The sentences were fine. They just had somebody standing in front of them, apologising.
Eighteen chapters down. Thirteen to go. It is twenty to two in the morning.
Love a very tired Mallory, being chased by a very demanding Freya x