Yes, I liked the film. If you're a quick reader, I doubt if the book takes much longer, and you can read it in the bath/Tube/kitchen.

Emma

The pages always get wet when I read in the bath. I've tried it many times, as the bath is my favourite place to be, and reading is my favourite thing to do, but I can never get the two to combine well.

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Erm . . . But yes, I will read The Hours.

That was another title I wanted for my novel.

One of the reasons I'm extravagant and tend to buy books rather than getting them from the library is that I don't feel able to read library books (or indeed books borrowed from friends and family) in the bath.

Emma

Oh I'm terrible for that - or dropping them down the side of the bed, or falling asleep on top of them all crushed and sad. Terrible really.

The two strands of TMOL weren't linked in plot, originally. The sophisticated types on the MPhil were happy with it like that, but the differently sophisticated book trade wasn't. I kicked and screamed, but did it in the end, and I have to say I think it's the better for it.

Sorry, Emma, coming to this late, but this fascinated me.

Could you expand a bit? How much work did getting it plot-linked take? Did you 'just' include a common (ancestral?) character? The ramifications on other characters? On the themes of the book?

I'm not sure I'd've had the stomach. In fact, when my agent said, quite euphemistically, that I needed to 'think laterally' about Book 1 I did the most lateral thing I could think of and ditched it. Four years work, gone. You're made of sterner stuff.

Well, it was a fair bit of work. The whole thing takes place in the same house, and it was knee-deep in linked ideas and references anyway, so I polished those up and made them more obvious, with phrases that echoed when an event had an echo in the other strand. And there's a lost boy who may - or may not - be so lost that he slips back and forth in time. But for plot... In the early strand there were letters, written by the narrator, and basically everyone wanted the narrator of the modern strand to read them. I hadn't done that because I couldn't bring myself to do the dusty-trunk-in-the-attic bit. But the whole novel's about photography and voyeurism, with a thick strand of reflections and windows, and light and time turning things dark or bleaching them. And I suddenly realised that if the letters were in an archive, she'd have photocopies, which is another such process, and some things would be visible through the paper back-to-front and only readable in a mirror. And the creases in the original letter paper would show etc. Then I got excited. I slotted her reading bits of the letters in, always after the early narrator had written them so I could just toss in a few phrases to remind the reader which bit she's got, and slid in lots of places where she thinks about the earlier people as she moves around those same places. I even sneaked in a few paragraphs I'd had to cut from his narrative (which confused the poor copy-editor dreadfully). And at the end, where she does something she never thought she'd do, she consciously does it because Stephen did something similar. I dithered about making her half-realise that she might be descended from the earlier owners - it seemed a bit creaky - but in the end I did.

Interestingly, my American editor wanted her to read the letters a little bit earlier in the book - I think to forestall the readers who're thinking 'why are these two in the same book?', which took a little re-jigging but not much. I'm not sure which I prefer - I can't really remember the US version - but it is rather odd to think of there being two different versions in the world - three, if you count my original MPhil submission!

I find if I can see how it should be done as well as why, then I'll do quite radical things at some elses's request. The other big change my agent wanted I saw why, but couldn't see how, and then she said 'what if he - ' and bingo! I undug my toes and could make it work.

Emma

It sounds as if you were asked to widen the appeal of the book by making some things a bit more obvious? It's possibly a moot point but do you think readers would have had to put more work into the previous version? Though much was probably gained - a readership, most importantly! - do you think anything was lost?

Did your agent tell you beforehand how much work she thought the book needed? Again, a moot point, but it's intersting to wonder how differently the book might've turned out if you'd signed with someone else.

I can't quite get my head round having two versions of the book out there. I think David Mitchell was asked to do the same for the US audience of number9dream. Makes me wonder if perhaps I ought to give the UK publication of a book whose US copy I disliked a try. Is there anyway of knowing beforehand if their are two different versions out there?

Sorry, for all the questions.

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and sorry for the typos

This is interesting to me, because I've just been advised to make two different – in some cases opposing – sets of changes to TWH depending on whether I go for the UK or US market. At the moment I can’t make up my mind what to do. The US line involves less change, but I can’t help wondering what would happen if it was published over there and then aimed at the UK market. Would I have to write all those changes after all? Should I bite the bullet and do it now? I really, really would prefer to see my novel published here before anywhere else, but it seems that UK publishers don’t want to touch it.

Dee

The connecting up of the two strands all happened before my agent saw it - a publishing friend was working on it with me. I think any agent I signed with would have said much the same thing. But it was something that even MPhil friends hinted at, only I defended what I was doing, partly because it did work... but only for the many, many fewer people who are used to picking up consciously on patterns of ideas and images, and find that on its own satisfying enough to keep them going with a novel. And partly, TBH, because I couldn't see how to do it in a way I was willing to. I don't actually think it lost anything - in fact I do think it's better to have the two strands intertwined more thoroughly, in the sense that the novel works better as a single whole. If I lost anything, I've no idea what it was, so it can't have mattered that much! To some extent it gained, in that a few pieces of Stephen's letters that I'd reluctantly cut in the interests of pace, got sneaked back in in Anna's reading of them. As well as keeping plot-lovers happy it also gained because instead of the letters just being there, the reader had Anna representing him/her as a reader, saying and thinking and wondering about things that I wanted the reader to say and think and wonder about. So overall it was an improvement. It just took me a few weeks to admit it!

As far as UK/US differences are concerned, they're really very slight - a matter of tweaks to the pace, nothing more. If you hated one version, you'd hate the other. I don't know at all about other writers, though. I remember my US editor saying 'I know some writers hate having different versions.' Hopefully, my agent will sell this one in the US at the same time as Headline get it, and I can integrate the different opinions into one final MS.

Dee, yes, that's a tricky decision to make, I can see. It must be tempting to do the lesser changes, but do the UK-style changes make sense? I know what you mean about wanting to be published in the UK. Apart from anything else, you can do much more at home about promoting it.

Emma