1  How’s the Book?

Hedda Count gives me thirty minutes every other Thursday, in her office. We spend twenty-six of them on work, which is what the thirty minutes are for. In the last four she turns her chair away from her monitor, folds her hands on the desk, and asks, “How’s the book?”

She has asked it at the end of every one-on-one we have ever had. She asked it the week of the reorganization, when she inherited six new reports and a calendar that looked like a parking garage. She asked it once from an airport gate, over a connection so bad I watched her mouth the words a full second before I heard them, and I answered the mouth.

Hedda is kind and busy. Most people manage one or the other. The busy ones skip the question. The kind ones with time to spare ask a second question, and a third, until you are explaining your book to someone who only wanted to know if you were all right. Hedda asks one question and has a hard stop at the half hour. It is the best arrangement I have ever had with anyone about anything.

The book was called Full Stop. It was a natural history of punctuation: where each mark came from, and who spread it. The comma, the colon, the semicolon, the dash, each with a chapter of its own and a small crowd of scribes, printers, and schoolmasters behind it, arguing.

I knew things nobody needed. I knew what the pilcrow was for before it was for nothing. I knew which marks had been invented on purpose and which had simply happened to a tired scribe near the end of a page. I owned a shelf of books on the history of the comma, and two of them disagreed with each other, which at the time I took as a sign of a healthy field.

I had been writing it for three years. It had eleven chapters.

It still does.

This is not that book. Full Stop stopped eleven chapters in, and instead of finishing it I built a piece of software called Quirework. The detour is what this book is about. Full Stop is in it the way the highway is in a story about a shortcut.

But in the beginning there was no detour. There was a book, and there were people who asked about it.

Outside work, when people asked what I was writing, I told them, and they made the face. It is the face you make when a stranger’s dog sits on your foot: warm, polite, and quietly looking around for the owner.

“Punctuation,” they would say.

“Punctuation.”

“Like commas?”

“There’s a chapter on commas.”

That was usually the end of it. Hedda never made the face. Hedda did not have time to make the face, and I have come to count that among her kindnesses.

There was one other person who asked, and he had more right to. Red Penn is my editor at a small press, and he was waiting for chapter twelve. He had read the other eleven. He had said nice things about them, in writing, which meant I could not pretend he hadn’t. Red did not ask often. Every few months he sent an email with the subject line “Checking in” and a body that said, in full, “Checking in.” I answered every one. I would have preferred a longer email. A longer email can be answered at length, and length can be mistaken for progress.

Hedda’s question came every other Thursday, though, and it needed an answer that fit in four minutes. So when she asked how the book was, I said, “Chapter four.”

The book had eleven chapters, and four is not where you expect to find someone who has written eleven. I had written them. Then I had gone back. Chapter four is on the dash, and it had developed a disagreement with chapter nine. I will come to that. I came to it a great deal.

“Chapter four” was the right size for a one-on-one. It was short. It was true. It had a number in it, and numbers sound like progress to anyone who is not watching them. Hedda would nod and say, “Good,” and write something down, and we would both stand up.

Two weeks later she would ask again, and I would say, “Chapter four.”

Hedda keeps a running document for our one-on-ones. Each time, she copies the previous section forward, puts the new date on it, and edits from there. Near the bottom, under Other, is a line that says Book: ch. 4. I have watched that line get copied forward through a reorganization, a new quarter, a new fiscal year, and a change to the document’s default font. It survived all of them without an edit. Nothing in Full Stop was that stable.

I spent the first twenty-six minutes of every one-on-one aware of the last four. I would be talking about a deadline, or a ticket, or somebody’s access to something, and a small part of me would be standing off to the side, rehearsing.

I tried other answers in my head on the walk to her office. “Good” was a lie. “Slow” invited a second question, and Hedda does not have time for a second question, and I did not have an answer to one. “Coming along” is what people say about a cold. “Chapter four” was the only answer I had that was both honest and over quickly, and I gave it the way some people give their zip code.

I occasionally selected the entire manuscript to see how many words I had. This was a useful thing to do when I had no new ones. The count included headings, abandoned passages, and instructions to myself to check things. I left those in. They had taken time to write. Then I clicked back into the text, carefully, so I wouldn’t replace the whole book with the next letter I typed. This was the closest I came to starting again.

Once, after I said it, she asked, “Still the dash one?”

She remembered. That was the hard part. I could have handled not being listened to. A manager who asks how the book is and does not hear the answer is just saying goodbye. Hedda heard it. She kept the chapter number in a document and the subject of the chapter in her head, and she asked about the dash by name, and there was nothing to do but say yes.

“Still the dash one,” I said.

“Good,” she said, and wrote something down.

I want to be careful about Hedda, because a book like this one seems to want someone standing in a doorway saying “Well?”, and it would be easy to cast her in the part. She was not that. Neither was Red. Each of them asked the one question the book could not answer yet, and each of them was right to ask it. The book was the one with the problem.

I did not know yet what the problem was. I thought it was chapter four. I thought that if I sat with chapter four long enough, and was careful enough, and read chapter nine one more time with a pencil, the two of them would agree, and I could tell Hedda “chapter twelve,” and then something with no number in it at all.

So every other Thursday, in the last four minutes, I walked into her office with the same answer in my pocket.

“How’s the book?” Hedda asked.

“Chapter four,” I said.