The Pram in the Hallway…
By:
February 20, 2011
In March of last year, we announced that we’d be publishing James Parker’s serialized novel, The Ballad of Cocky the Fox, in twenty installments, here at HILOBROW. In April, we posted the first installment… and earlier this month, we posted the twentieth. Cocky the Fox is over — long live Cocky the Fox!
Between April 2010 and February 2011, James wrote some 45,000 words — an impressive feat. Especially impressive if you happen to know how blocked he was, as a novelist, before we arrived at the idea of serializing his Cocky story.
HILOBROW’s editors dutifully played their role — stern, demanding, hectoring. James didn’t require as much nagging as we might have feared… but still, there were weeks when he sent us emails like this one:
brothers – i hit a little wall with cocky #5 last week and then got sucked into a globe column, so i’m behind. i think i know what the wall was about, though, and will be attempting to dig my way under it in the next couple of days. we’re off-schedule, though, for which i apologize – with a bit of sweat and inspiration we can win back the ground over the next 2/3 weeks…
And this one:
joshy/matthew – we’ve got a situation over here – just discovered (at 9pm!) that when we flush our toilet it causes water to splash down through the floor and into the basement – so we’re going over to the holiday inn for the night while we wait for the plumber to come in the morning.
And this one:
august off sounds awesome! and yes, i will be using it to claw ahead again – i apologize to all for the harum-scarum nature of the last month’s cocky-ness. joshy, you’ve been excellent about keeping me on track and in touch with the schedule – i salute you – i just hit a great fat node of resistance and had to dissolve it with tears and sighs. the wisdom of the 2-chapters-ahead system is clear to me, though, and i’m going back there.
And this one:
you’re totally right and gentlemanly and i apologise for peevishness – simply the sound of a slightly-squeezed head, and a desire not to be writing during the queen’s speech. i am beyond grateful for the editing and the more general stewardship – including ass-pinching, whistle-blowing and all of it. i do feel pressured, but then again, i know very well that without the pressure i wouldn’t be producing – so i’m afraid you’re just dealing with my strange complain-y creative apparatus – and dealing most gracefully. deep down i am confident in the story, the plan, the schedule, the whole fucking thing – i just have to growl like rumpy sometimes. i’m sorry!
Now that it’s all over, and we’re all friends again, we thought we’d make a word-cloud from James’ missed-deadline emails and see if any patterns emerge. Here it is!
What do you see, readers?