Starting Monday, November 10, I’m back to a dozen posts about the work in progress. Don’t expect poetry. The blogs will be mostly nuts and bolts (and a little whining) about rewriting the manuscript. I need a bigger than giant attention span to get this part finished by Nov. 25. Blogging helps.
The first time I heard the phrase, to the mattresses, I was 14 and reading Mario Puzo’s The Godfather. It was summer vacation at my parent’s lake house. I was away from my friends and crazy-bored. It never occurred to me (or my parents as far as I know) that a novel about mafia brutality might not be appropriate for an eighth grade girl in the seventies. Fascinated, I read cover-to-cover. When the movie came out, I wasn’t shocked by the horse head in the bed scene. I’d read the book already, and the book was better.
According to The Phrase Finder , the meaning of to the mattresses is:
to prepare for battle or adopt a warlike stance.
That’s what I have to do to get this thing done. To the Mattresses. . .
CRISPLY SPOKEN 