The Challenge (Part One)

If this post were spoken word, you'd hear the relief in my voice.

It's been a lazy evening and a patchy night's sleep since pressing the 'send' button, but the listlessness that accompanies the completion of a large project (you know, the big ones that make themselves a part of your life) is still with me.

I received an email ten weeks ago via the salsa-merengue.co.uk website asking whether I would be willing to accept a commission for an article. Dubiousness was the first pang I felt; my inbox pays unflinching witness all sorts, including some interesting uses for meringue. I responded with a cautious expression of interest and began my due diligence. Some email tennis and surfing later it turned out that the query was legitimate, and from a top-end publisher.

The Mission, should I have chosen to accept it, was to write about the globalisation of salsa as an entry for an encyclopaedia, in the house style, to a whale-bone corset of a three thousand words, and have it peer-reviewed by some pretty august peers... in two and a half months.

I exhaled slowly and leant back in my chair.

It's a tough ask for any professional; not any single factor, but all of them in combination. The whole world in two months, allowing for the unforeseen. Daunted was the second pang. There were plenty of reasons, excuses all, I could think of not to step up to the mark. On the other side of the balance scales, well, financially let's just say that people accepting this kind of commission do so to enhance their standing. But with a peer-review system that's never a guarantee; so if I did it at all, it would be for other reasons and publication would have to be the icing on the cake.

I wrote back accepting the challenge. Because I knew above all that if I didn't, I'd forever be thinking 'What if?'

And so it began.

The first three weeks, I started a master document of possibly-relevant points, mapped out a coarse structure and had a stab at the introduction. The points alone came up to four thousand words. Oops! And the draft intro didn't speak clearly, and the run into the section following felt like blocked circulation telling me that the framework was weak. Difficulty in coming up with a convincing working title simply confirmed it.

But by this time, thankfully, I had a pretty good idea of what I didn't know.

Although I could now hear every tick of the clock, there was no alternative but to track down more sources and put extra mileage on my eyeballs. Another precious four weeks passed, but as they progressed a shiny new structure emerged with the working title 'Transnational flows of salsa' and there came an opening section that flowed. The downside was that the increased knowledge made the master document tip over seven thousand words.

With well less and a month to go there was a culling of points with some frantic biro action and a rather tired-looking laptop, working on a combination of paper and keyboard. The rest of life was put on hold - practice sessions, nights dancing, and sleep were sacrificed on the tall altar of penmanship. In return I had the benedictions of more caffeine, eating out in restaurants where I could put paper to work, and more trips to the gym to pair mental tiredness with the physical.

It was a strange but nonetheless welcome consolation to hear from friends that I was being missed.

The last fortnight passed in a blur: the first draft was finished with seven days to go at just over four thousand words; then came five cycles of editing as I chopped off successive layers of literary fat. Editing was painful but necessary, serving to focus on what exactly was the core of the subject. Close to the end, the structure looked like this:

1. Introduction describing transnational salsa as a music and dance genre;
2. Origins of the word, from flavour term to stylistic label;
3. Properties of the music including the psychoacoustics for dance;
4. Structural elements of a 'typical' salsa song;
5. The five main schools of salsa performance with a comment on corroborating dance movement;
6. Historical perspective on the development of each school;
7. Other areas of production including the re-Africanization of salsa;
8. References and recommended reading/listening/watching.
   

It's over, at least for now.

Unlike patronage during the Renaissance, this is 'try-before-you-buy' and I have to await the outcome of the editors' review. Until then, there's a more than a little reflection to be done.

Loo Yeo