Joe Spork was a hallucination.

Not, thankfully, my hallucination. He was a brief moment of madness in my first book, The Gone-Away World. He came in part from reading Robert Warshow‘s amazing and compelling critical writing about gangster movies. The essay is in The Immediate Experience, which I (obviously) love. Warshow commits all the sins of the period in terms of asserting his opinion or viewpoint as fact, and it matters not at all because what he says is intriguing on the one hand and revealing about his time on the other.

The other thing in my head, which dovetailed with Warshow’s writing, was The Wasteland. (Well, yeah. Eliot’s poem exerts a kind of gravitational pull on anyone who reads it, even if they hate it.) The bit which has always stuck with me is the ‘unreal city’.

So suddenly, here was this enormously powerful, iconic narrative of the gangster, and it made a brief appearance in TGAW. But it wouldn’t go away. Joe Spork wasn’t content to be a hallucination, he wanted to be real. Well, okay, smartass, you can have your own book.

So the Joe in Angelmaker is connected to the Joe in TGAW, somehow, in my brain. And the two books have some crossovers, tiny things at the edges. But Angelmaker is in no way a sequel or a prequel. It is its own thing, most definitely.

_____

Writing the book took a long time. Mostly that was because I hadn’t ever written a second novel before and I wasn’t prepared for the energy needed to reach escape velocity. There were always things I needed to do: publicity things for TGAW, fighting the GBS, and so on. But I finished a draft in late 2009, and that’s when the hard work started. Mrs H read it and pronounced it exciting but unfit for human consumption. I rewrote, and Patrick Walsh read it and pronounced it fabulous, but not entirely ready. I rewrote it. Jason Arthur and Edward Kastenmeier read it, and got very excited, but said it really needed some work. And so, and so, and so: note how all these people were very kind about finding a way to tell me the book was a mess and needed life-saving surgery lest it expire before ever truly being alive.

It was a long and winding road. The elephant as court scribe/narrator was the first casualty, then the golden man, then back to the elephant and the tricky business of the parachute. The hat-tip to Warren Ellis’s Planetary bit the dust at some point, then the pink leather engine driver’s uniform, and finally the reference to The Princess Bride. On the advice of Twitter in general, and knowing that it was the right thing to do, I removed the Emperor Palpatine quote.

I was killing the little weevils of silly which had spawned in the rich creamy cheese of madness which is Angelmaker and in repairing the holes in the action left by these absences, I brought more of the heart of the book to the text of the book. The editorial process is like twelve-month root canal work. But it is mighty.

Leaving, at the end, a couple of things which startle me, which I shall talk about later. For now… *phew*. :)

Since Amazon have it, I feel I can safely post this image of the jacket!

Jason Booher, the brain behind the US TGAW jackets, has excelled himself in designing Angelmaker for Knopf. It’s just gorgeous. There are some tweaks to come to make it even cooler and cleverer (and, yes, more achingly purchasable) but basically what you see here is the heart of it. Amazon lists the book as due March 20th 2012, which is, as you might say, within the margin of error. I had it in my diary as Feb/March, and we all know that Amazon dates can turn out to be a little more definite than the available information actually merits, but hey. It’s about then. You’ll know when I do. (Or possibly somewhat before – my fave independent initiative, Indiebound, lists March 20th as well. Oh ho! Could it be? I must find out.)

I saw this design earlier this year, in the midst of one of what now seems like a million passes at the text of the book to get it right, and it lifted me out of a kind of gloomy certainty that the damn thing would never see the light of day into an altogether more positive determination to get the job done. “There’s a jacket design! It’s real, I tell you, REAL! BWAHAHAHAHAA!”

Mrs Harkaway locked me in the garden until I stopped cackling. Since the garden was at the time a concrete and black plastic sheet over a foot-deep layer of manure, this was a remarkably effective tactic, but she is not to do it again.

(I got my revenge by changing her alarm clock noise to this and not telling her. Sandra Boynton, in case I have not mentioned this, is made entirely from awesome.)

Back to the Angelmaker jacket - did I mention that I love it? – it came in two flavours, matt and gloss. The matt one was very grown up and looked a bit more literary. It was also easier to spot from some angles. The shiny one, of course, was a blaze of imprudent glory, and everyone fell in love with its slutty come-open-me-and-read-me-til-you-can’t-take-any-more attitude. I tried to be serious and professional about the whole thing. I took the two jackets and shoved them side by side on the mantel, which was hopeless because it just emphasised that they were both gorgeous in different ways. I asked people in cafés, which is my favourite scientific method for learning nothing of any quantifiable worth. In the end, I just told Edward Kastenmeier that I loved them both but I loved this bit of this one and that bit of that one and could we combine the two? Edward made what I have come to think of as the ‘editor noise’. It is the noise editors make when authors act like five-year-olds. It is a brief, silent gap in the audible landscape during which they count to ten or pray or stab themselves in the leg with a fork.

“We can make it pop,” Edward said.

“It totally pops now,” I said. “I just think it could pop more in these cool ways I have recently demanded from you because I know that you love when I ask for something more than the amazingness you have already given me.”

“I do love that,” Edward said. “I will speak to the design team about how to make it pop more. They actually have some insane poppy things they want to do anyway. We will implement your helpful and inexpensive suggestions at the same time, although probably not the last one about the neon lights and the built-in corkscrew, because of our pesky US drinking age laws.”

“Right you are,” I said.

This is how all our editor-author conversations go. Honestly.

So I don’t know if this is exactly how the book will look. But it’s close.

The UK jacket is still in the works, although the images I’ve seen are also stunning. By way of compensation, the UK may get the book fractionally earlier – late February, I think – which means UK readers will have longer to think about its deeper meaning (which I will discuss in detail with anyone who wants to tell me what it is) before the Mayan Apocalypse.

That sound you hear? That is me dancing the many-footed Harkaway Dance of Jackety Goodness. Yea, unto the second generation, because my daughter can almost stand up by herself now, so we are dancing it together, Mrs H being at work and therefore unable to join in and/or stop us.

Laterz, d00dz.