What Rough Draft, It's Hour Come Round at Last

Deadlines make me moody.

This year it so happened that the production deadline for Spellbound landed only a few days after the convention for my regional meeting of the American College of Physicians. I could have played hooky…if I weren't on the meeting's planning commit and if I weren't helping Dr. Verghese teach a CME version of a Stanford 25 session at the meeting. So for the past 80 hours I've been driving up and down the peninsula, helping teach physical exam skills, sitting on council meetings, and/or editing as fast as I could. Medicine and publishing and sleep-deprivation, three weird flavors that taste even weirder when mixed together.

I think most people take naps when they're sleep-deprived. Me, I like to write mash-ups of apocalyptic Irish poems and publishing life. Practical, right? Sometime around 2AM last night the following (inspired by an fbook exchange with Megan a year ago) started bouncing around in my head. Though I'm feeling post-submission light and fluffy now, back then I was a ball of deadline moodiness. Let's all take a moment for derivative snark.

The Second Book!

by W.B. Yeats B.R. Charlton

Turning and turning in the widening plot

The author cannot hear the editor;

Denouements fall apart; the chapters cannot hold;

Mere action sequences are loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed typos are loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of editing is drowned;

The best lack all punctuation, while the worst

Are full of passionate inconsistencies.

Surely some revision is at hand;

Surely the Second Book is at hand.

The Second Book! Hardly are those words out

When a vast image out of the PR Department

Troubles my sight: somewhere in the lands of printers

A shape with dragon body and the protag of a man,

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

Is moving its slow bindings, while all about it

Reel shadows of the internet book critics.

The darkness drops again; but now I know

That twelve months of my sleepless writing

were vexed to nightmare by internet piracy,

And what rough draft, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards production to be published?