Beating the Ghost Drum -- Susan Price

I can always remember when I bought my first 'word-processor', a clunky Amstrad, because I was then  working on the final rewrites of Ghost Drum. The book had already been accepted for publication by Faber. These edits were something like the twelfth or thirteenth rewrite. Before I'd even sent it to my agent, I'd rewritten all of it from beginning to end, several times, and different parts of it, many times more. As my brother once said, "Writers don't write. They rewrite."

The latest Ghost Drum cover

Oddly, the opening paragraphs, often one of the most difficult to get right, were almost unchanged from the start. I'd 'written' them in my head during long walks and bus-rides, learning them by heart, before I ever began writing the book on paper. Through all the rest of the rewriting, they hardly changed.

In a place far distant from where you are now, grows an oak-tree by a lake. 

Round the oak's trunks is a chain of golden links.

Tethered to the chain is a learned cat, and this most learned of all cats walks round and round the tree continually.

 As it walks one way, it sings songs.

As it walks the other, it tells stories.

This is one of the stories the cat tells.

My story is set (says the cat) in a far-away Czardom, where the winter is a cold half-year of darkness.In that country, the snow falls deep and lies long, lies and freezes until bears can walk on its thick crust of ice. The ice glitters on the snow like white stars in a white sky! In the north of that country all the winter is one long night, and all that long night long the sky-stars glisten in their darkness, and the snow-stars glitter in their whiteness, and between the two there hangs a shivering curtain of cold twilight...

But the Amstrad word-processor...

I'd taken on a house-sitting job for the friend of a friend.  They were going away for more than a month and were worried about their house being empty all that time. I was glad of the opportunity to have a rent-free haven of quiet, to get on with work, so I packed up my typewriter and piles of manuscript.

This was before I could drive, so the couple came over and picked me up, the day before they left. That evening, the husband, a great gadget lover, enjoyed showing off his latest one: an Amstrad PCW8512.

Collector's item on e-bay

I was interested because I'd been hearing and reading a lot about these new-fangled computer word-processor thingies. I was a bit doubtful about their usefulness to me. I listened to Cyril enthusing about how you could make corrections on screen, how you could pull blocks of text about the page, check spellings, insert images...

But my upbringing was one where every penny counted and you didn't spend on anything you didn't really need. Yes, it seemed these word-processors had their uses. But I'd got on fine, so far, with an electric typewriter, carbon papers for copies, correction fluid... It took more time and trouble, but cost much, much less than the £300 (or thereabouts) it would cost me to buy one of these things.

Cyril happened to have a report he needed to print out, one several pages long. Carried away by enthusiasm, he decided to print it out then and there, to show me how simple it all was. He highlighted the report on-screen and pressed print. There was a grumbling and grinding as the printer considered the matter. Then: brrrr! Pages shot from the printer and cascaded to the floor. The report was printed.

Those several pages had printed in the time it took to snatch a breath. I was staggered. "No corrections," Cyril said. "You do all your corrections on screen. When you've got it exactly as you want it, then you print it."

Ghost Drum wasn't my first book. I'd been a writer for over ten years and I'd had to produce 'a good copy' for several books. This was the copy that you sent to an agent and/or publisher.

After all the rewrites, after all the retyping of pages with scribbled alterations in ink...

     After all the retyping of pages that had been cut up and stuck back together in different orders..

       After all the retyping where you'd decided to change the chapter breaks...

          After all the retyping where you'd changed the names of one or more characters...

               After all that, when you'd finally decided that there were no more changes to be made...

                    Then you had to retype it all over again, to produce 'a good copy', one you could reasonably ask a busy person to read.

The rule: no more than two inked alterations per page. If you made more typos than that, the page had to be retyped.

So you'd start, on the day you'd decided you were going to begin this task. And, always-- always-- the first page you typed had mistakes on every line. Misspellings. Sausage-finger misprints. Misreading of words. Typing out the line below the line you should have typed... So you'd have to scrap that page and start again.

Once you got into it, mistakes were fewer, but the first page or two after a break had to be scrapped. And then you'd get tired and mistakes multiplied. You'd give up until the next day-- when it all repeated. And it went on and on for months.

I remember typing away like this in a unheated room, somewhere around Christmas, wearing a hat, coat and big woolly socks. I had to give up when my fingers became too numb. (The room's only source of heat was a fireplace and was it worth the annoyance of lighting a fire? Well, no, because I was only going to be typing for about fifteen minutes-- ha!-- and the fire wouldn't even have burned up, let alone warmed the room by then.)

And here was a machine that meant I could dodge all that. I could rewrite and rewrite as much as I liked-- cut and paste-- swop chapters around-- change characters' names in seconds by using 'find and replace' -- but, here's the thing:--

At the end of it all, I wouldn't have to type out a 'good copy.'

At the end of it all, I could press 'print' and print out the entire book in, literally, a few minutes.

I felt dizzy. I felt high.

Reader, as soon as that house-sitting ended and I returned to civilisation, (well, to the Black Country), I went straight out and bought an Amstrad PCW8512.

I loved it. I finished working through the editor's notes and rewrites for Ghost Drum on it. When all the rewrites were finished, I printed 'a good copy' in minutes.

And I've never had to type out 'a good copy' since. Huzzah!

Ghost Drum was published in 1987. I remember the date, because it won the Carnegie for that year. Which means I must have bought my Amstrad in 1985-86.

Which is all a long-winded way of saying that, when I thrilled to the sight of those pages hurtling from the Amstrad, I had no idea that the book would win the Carnegie, be translated into many languages, have Japanese Manga companies sniffing around it (though getting no further than sniffing) --  and then be re-published in its old age, nearly forty years later.

Faber and Faber have republished it as a 'Faber Classic' with the new cover shown here. I couldn't be more pleased.

The Carnegie medal
Well, my Carnegie medal, to be exact. Don'tchaknow. Photographed on my kitchen table.

Part of our collection of Young Adult Classics, this stunning Carnegie-winning tale takes us to a world of darkness and ice, where a shaman and a prince fight for their freedom.

In the darkest hour of a freezing Midwinter, a night-walking witch adopts a newborn baby and carries her off in her house on chicken legs. She names her Chingis and teaches her the Three Magics...

The Czar of this cold realm fears his newborn son, Safa, will out do him, and so imprisons the baby at the top of a tall tower, to live and die there without ever glimpsing the real world. Loneliness and confinement drive him to rage and despair...

Chingis and Safa's quest for freedom will take them even through the Ghost World into the Land of the Dead.

A timeless and atmospheric tale of fierce magic.

 

Buy The Ghost Drum here