Carrion Comfort - By Dan Simmons Page 0,4

APEX buses of kids before 6:30 A.M. and classes started shortly after 7 A.M.—and would madly type up the chapters finished the night before. My big expenditure at that time was a used and repaired IBM Selectric typewriter purchased from a rental place. It was a huge decision to spend that much money on technology, but my old, small Olivetti typewriter just couldn’t keep up with the demands of typing out multiple drafts of what became a fifteen-hundred-plus-page mega-novel.

The story for Carrion Comfort was so complex— at least for me— and the cast of characters so large, that for the first and only time in my writing career, the walls of my tiny extra-bedroom-turned-office were covered with long strips of brown paper on which I’d tracked the actions, interactions, and ultimate fates of the many characters in lines of different-colored magic marker. Melanie Fuller, I remember, was red. Saul Laski was blue. Nina Drayton was a brief yellow. Tony Harod was a billious green. The Oberst, Willi, was a thick Nazi black. Up and down all my study’s walls ran a riot of dozens of colored lines, crossing, crisscrossing, with scribbled notes at the junctions and important points. Sometimes the lines terminated with a terrible suddenness where the character died. The ceiling-to-floor strips of scribbled butcher paper looked like a seismometer’s readout run amuck.

All around me, day after day through that autumn and winter and spring, were growing stacks of filled yellow legal pads, taller stacks of reference books and maps, and growing mountains of multiple-typed drafts of Carrion Comfort. From time to time I kept Jim Frenkel apprised of how large the book was going to be. “No problem,” was the only response I got from my publisher-editor.

The book was due in the autumn of 1986. That summer, I hired our APEX secretary, Arleen, to work for me from her own home, daily typing up my revised revisions of the retyped and revised chapters I continued to churn out. I not only had fifty or sixty legal pads filled with scribbles and X-outs and revisions now, I also had four or more two-and-a-half-foot-tall heaps of my own typed manuscripts.

That summer I worked between sixteen and twenty hours a day on Carrion Comfort. Jane would come in to play on the floor of the study to be close to me, if she could find a bare spot on the floor of the tiny room. Karen would say good night to me at ten or eleven P.M., knowing that I would be working another four or five hours into the quiet night. Every day Arleen would bring back typed pages of the next-to-final-draft, minus the last few hundred pages I was still writing, and I’d scribble more revisions on them and send them back to her while I continued to write the new pages longhand. It was exhausting chaos. It was madness. I loved it.

Karen and I were concerned about the expense of hiring Arleen as a typist, but we reassured ourselves. That $12,500 half of the payment upon signing was a fortune. And half of the other $12,500 would be ours upon acceptance, the final $6,250 upon publication of the hardcover early in 1987. So what if I had to pay the entire first half of the advance out in typewriter purchase, typist’s fees, and magic markers? We had a book to finish!

Late that summer, I finished Carrion Comfort. One thousand five hundred and thirty-four pages. The last I’d heard from James Frenkel and Bluejay weeks and weeks before, when I’d told him the final length of the opus, was—“That’s long, but don’t worry. We can handle it in one book.” (Frenkel hadn’t read a page of it, but he liked the verbal updates on the story.)

In the last days of my theoretical summer vacation before I went back to the eighty-to-hundred hours a week APEX teaching, I was spending days and nights madly typing up the last draft of some chapters. Arleen— much more speedily— typed up other chapters I gave her. We finished the day before school started again. I took the day off and went up to our town’s little public swimming pool with Karen and Jane. Lying in the end-of-summer sunlight (I was as pale as a grub), I looked around at the other families and swimmers and thought This— these few hours—is my summer vacation.

It had been worth it.

Just as I was ready to send Carrion Comfort to Frenkel, I learned two things: my first