Let’s do it again.

On the writer’s weaving loom, seven, eight, a hundred times hand in your art.

It was high time I got down to work. The year 2013 will have been full of surprises for me, starting with the signing of the contract with VLB, then the decline of my business and, finally, employment at Spiria. All the roads seem fertile again, and even the one of singing becomes clearer, frees itself. Something is happening in my head as much as in my throat, in my heart. May 2014 continue to build on this momentum.

So I took the text back, as partially annotated by the editor before she stopped and handed it to me so that I could review the "orality of my characters", i.e. the level of language sometimes a little too borrowed. She would also like me to describe the places more, to put less emphasis on theatricality to some extent and to return to a more literary sweetness.

First of all, I get rid of the dashes of dialogue, I dare the French quote instead. Equipped with a small Word macro of my own, I scroll through the dialogues without too much trouble. Removing all these dashes in the text, I feel like I’m giving the characters back their voice. Maybe it’s an illusion. Nevertheless, my text is also very visual in the way it is thrown to the reader. We live in an era of images, framing, symbolic shortcuts. I try, in my own way, to dust off my poetry and I don’t want to take anything away from the rhythm of the dialogues, the vivacity and the fragile spontaneity of the feelings.

Adding text is dangerous because it is still the first draft and I would not want to appear too clumsy, to get caught up in the color of too thick a carpet of good intentions. Doubts immediately beset me with the sentences thrown out. Damn it, three times the word tray, what the hell are you thinking? And then, of course, land in the shape of a rice field in Quebec, you’re kidding a little bit, there.... (see picture). Well, my country is totally invented. I have been doing this since The Casimir Effect. My Quebec remains imaginary.

Getting back into the minds of the many characters in the novel is both moving and destabilizing. They still challenge me and I don’t want to rewrite them, distort them or even delete them. These imagined beings are as many echoes of my personality and I must make them live even if the act is, in itself, lost in advance.

I don’t know what I am, but I have to communicate, I have to come out of the shell in which I was born. I have a mission and it is written nowhere else than in my will. No one can do anything about it but me.

I can’t wait for this one to come out!

And my manuscript is still called Les Mailles sanguines. I’m going to have a lot of trouble, I think, dusting off the title...