Exhaustive Scrutiny

And then it was over.

The Slow Palace is done. Actually done, this time — I'm finished the final edits. I can't promise I won't wake up in the middle of the night with a perfectly turned phrase I need to add, and prudence dictates that I read over the chapters I'm going to submit before I submit them, and someday, God willing, I'll have editor-directed changes to make...but the book is done. I ripped apart the chapter that needed ripping apart, and added the scene the last chapter needed, and checked off all the bits of color in my notebook, and added a crazy prophet flinging burnt hair around to the third chapter...and I'm done.

I took a bike ride earlier today, down along the Charles into Waltham. There's a new gallery there I wanted to check out, and some interesting marshland (the "Lake District" of the Charles), and the gallery was charming and the woodsy trail was green and quiet and gorgeous. What I hadn't planned to see was the Waltham Watch Factory, a beautiful red brick industrial behemoth with spires and clock towers that's slowly being transformed into offices and lofts and cafés. They have a little museum, which was entirely deserted when I went in: slick glass cases in air-conditioned air, containing watches and tiny gears and tiny springs, and belt-driven machines used to make screws and gears and mainsprings, and plans and advertisements and so on.

The protagonist of The Slow Palace is Scrutiny, a (sort of) 16th-century clockmaker. I've been vicariously living his life, thinking his thoughts, for over ten years. After tonight, he won't be inhabiting my head anymore. Looking at the watch parts, at the screws the size of commas and the blue moth-tongue springs in their tiny gyroscope casings, I realized that I felt a little like I was taking him out for a treat, like taking a kid to the zoo before sending him off to boarding school, letting him see through my eyes the wonderful and improbable advances that would come in the next five centuries. I know he's only a subprocess in my brain, but I'm going to miss having him there; it felt good, in a melancholy (and admittedly self-indulgent) sort of way, to do something special for him. I teared up a little, like an idiot, alone in the air conditioning.

But I think he appreciated it.

Next week is the week of writing a twelve-page outline.