Oh frabjous day, callooh callay!

It's snowing - and sleeting occasionally, but thank god it isn't raining. No, wait, and it's raining again. Henry Sutton flat out told me that Norfolk is the driest part of England; at this point I'm thinking that he was having me on. You don't have to be green and wear pointy shoes to dissolve here.

End of term is looming, which means there are suddenly heaps of deadlines. I've been doing edits for the anthologies that are coming out around/just before Christmas, because that's the best way I can think of to procrastinate writing my PhD proposal. Yeah, I do a double-take too, when I think that: I've got no business getting near a PhD, I can't even eat a chocolate ice cream without getting it all over my face. But better a PhD than a child at this point, and I'd rather spend the next three years writing a novel than chasing a toddler. Literary criticism has a special place in my heart, or possibly some other organ as it gets me irrationally excited, and the only way I can see to spend three more years semi-affordably studying it is to stick it out wherever I can get funding.

Last week I attended a reading by D. W. Wilson from his book of shorts Once You Break a Knuckle. It was a cosy event, as Wilson is a PhD candidate at UEA and a veteran of their MA program, so it's perfectly acceptable to have him sit on the drinks table to read while we all pack around. He's Canadian by birth, but the story that he read reminded me of home, and his presence there was a reminder of the adage "never say never." There is no market for short story collections from unknown authors, but his first published book is one such collection. Rejection slips get everyone down, but all you need is one acceptance to get a work in print. Winning the BBC prize for one of the pieces in the collection certainly helped procure that acceptance, but if he hadn't submitted to the prize in the first place, he never would have won.

At the end of the evening, one of the other students asked him for the advice that he would give his younger self. He said that most people insist that you can't make a living writing, that you have to find some worthwhile work and write in the margins, but that's just bull. If writing is the work that you have to do, the work you want to do, do everything you can to make it your work. Life can work out around it.

Of course, that can only happen if you keep on submitting.

"murder your babies"

Chloe showed up in my bedroom while I was working on my PhD proposal the other day. She lay down on my comforter with her boots on, started eating my after 8 mints, and asked when I was going to do something with her already.

I’ve got a relationship with some of my characters. Maybe this is a common thing, I have no way of knowing, but in my case it’s funny because of the way I write. Literary short stories are taken slowly, built from the ground up, carefully researched; if I spend enough time on it, the characters become real to me. It’s not a conscious thing, I don’t sit down as I’m working and decide what her favorite food is or how she feels about her mother, but I come to know these details through proximity with the character – this means that every character in the 16-story cycle that is my undergraduate dissertation has a fully realized backstory, and each of those stories has at least three important characters.

That’s the literary fiction. The money I’ve made from writing has come from writing to prompts and selling to specific markets. It’s usually three days between when I find a call for submissions and when I send out a piece, if it takes me much longer to come up with something chances are it’s not going to be good in time to be submitted for that prompt. Usually in this case the characters leap up fully realized as well, though not quite as three dimensionally as when I’ve had time to hang out with them. And if the story is more dependent on plot than character – romance usually, because when you’ve got a 3,000 word limit kissing is more important than character development – they might be more cardboard cutouts with names than real people.

The less real the characters are to me, the less I mind changing the story to satisfy the market. The opposite is also true.

Chloe has been floating around in my psyche for five years now. I’ve tried to write her story over and over, but it clunked every time. I couldn’t get a handle on her or her situation, but I knew she was there. The summer before my senior year I lived in a tiny house on the edge of the barrier islands in Virginia, with no phone, no internet and no friends. I’d been directed to draft out the beginning of my Honors project and had no ideas, so I spent a lot of time crabbing, sunning, and target shooting. One of those afternoons with my brother’s gun on our upstairs porch, thinking about the ex that wasn’t leaving me alone, I wondered how hard it would be to shoot someone. And Chloe appeared, and allowed herself to be frantically drafted. Since I’m lazy, her house is that house, adjusted very slightly. Of course, my advisor eventually axed the lines that were my door into her story, the lines that I began with and that I liked best. They do say kill your darlings, a piece of wisdom I often misquote as “murder your babies.” And it doesn’t matter, as I still have Chloe: almost thirteen, dirty, foul-mouthed, quiet, nearly feral, mostly self-sufficient, and borderline sociopathic. She’d probably be my favorite even if she hadn’t been my door into so many things. And sometimes she shows up unexpectedly, gets her feet all over my furniture, and tells me that there’s more coming, she’s just not sure where from yet. So I wait for an editor who doesn’t want me to make her a nice girl, doesn’t want me to erase her sociopathic tendencies, because I feel like I owe this character something, if only her integrity.

And, since I like them and want them to go somewhere, here are those lines that I took out in the final draft:

Sometimes, when I’m holding the .22 like that, getting a careful sight on my target and breathing out really slow, I wonder how much harder it would be to shoot a real person. It’s a bigger target, so I’m guessing it would be easier, but they say that when it comes to shoot someone with a face, that’s got a name and is looking at you, even real soldiers have a hard time doing it. Maybe that’s why so many people get shot in the back, like Cabel Bloxom. Before he died, I would be up on the porch shooting, and wonder if I’d be able to shoot him if he did come for me and Renee, like he said he would. Or, I would wonder if I’d be able to keep from shooting him. Everyone around here knows we’re home on our own all summer long. They say that Mama ran off to Atlantic City, but I know better. If someone came after us, there would be no one but me to stop them. 

Call me a creeper, but...

I have a habit of listening to Americans on the bus.

You can't really help it if you're in the top of a crammed double decker, it's not like we're divided into private compartments and I've got a glass pressed to the wall. Usually I overhear people's conversations, and usually I ignore them, but American accents make me prick up my ears. Part of it could be that the only people I've heard talking louder on public transportation are Australians, otherwise no one beats us for volume.

UEA has a pretty international base of students, and a lot of the Americans I hear are in the country for the first time, as undergrads on a year abroad. Usually they're whining. If they're with another American they're whining about how the Brits Don't Get It, and if they're with a Brit they're whining about the subtle differences in culture that they didn't expect.

Maybe a few years ago I wouldn't have heard it as whining. The English tend to put a more positive, diplomatic spin on things, which makes my countrymen seem rude in comparison. Even though they embarrass me - though no where near as much as the Bush administration did - I still have the weird urge to go talk to them. Spending time with other Americans in general isn't any more appealing than spending time with people from my course - less so, probably, since we'd have much less to talk about - but hearing the out-of-place accent cutting through the somnolent air makes me wonder where they're from, how they wound up so far from home, whether they'll come around and never want to go back, or rush home at the first chance and get laughs from friends and family talking about the little differences in lifestyle that so annoy them now. Stories appeal to me, and every time I watch one of them walk off the bus ahead of me I regret not having the guts to call them out while exposing my own not-belonging-ness for the sake of answering the questions: why here, why now, why you, what next?

It doesn't matter, by the way, how I feel about the Bush administration personally. The year of undergrad I spent here I spoke as little as possible, because every time I opened my mouth someone would declare "You're an American!" like they'd just discovered the secret of the universe, and then demand I explain what brand of moron voted for Bush, supported his policies, and was generally responsible for their view of the U.S. It got so prevalent that by Christmas my standard introduction was "I'm an American, I'm so sorry, I wasn't old enough to vote in the last election so please don't hold me responsible for my country." It's hard to be proud of your country when every time you go for a pint some drunk wants to lynch you because of its foreign policy.

And, regardless of how I voted in yesterday's election, I'm glad it turned out how it did: the English do not approve of Romney in the slightest and I'm just not up for another four years of apologizing for being an American.

Editors and Other Things

Norwich has crazy bipolar weather: it'll be bright and sunny, but by the time I get my shoes on and am heading out the door for a walk it will be pouring down rain. Get the shoes off and crack a book, it's sunny again. Wash, rinse, repeat, until I got so sick of it I ran off to Reading for a few days, because it's sunnier there and the work can't follow me because Dave won't tell me the password to the internet.

Last week I was fussing to myself because I needed to e-mail my editor and I didn’t have sufficient brain to do so and sound intelligent. Then I stopped, realized I have an editor (four, actually), and did a little dance.

A lot of people seem to have a funny view of editors. They make all the money, make all the decisions, and do none of the work. They also seem to get a lot of the credit. “We love your story, we have to have it!” is the sort of thing they say. “Just change the father to a mother, the cat to a dog, and lose the kid with cancer.”

Maybe it’s my luck, but I love the ones I’ve had. There are a lot of pieces that I’m mostly happy with but don’t really know how to make any better, and rather than sitting on them until they’re perfect I send them somewhere I think they’ll fit, hoping for a bite. A good editor can tell me what needs to change in order to turn a piece into what I intended it to be when I began. The editor I mentioned earlier was helping me finish off “Practical Necromancy,” which, as my first crack ever at the horror/suspense genre, I didn’t feel too sure of. I knew that the story delivered in the second half, but while the first half set the scene sufficiently it didn’t have the degree of tension that I wanted, and after a month of on and off tinkering I couldn’t figure out how to create that freaked-out feeling right from the beginning. She didn’t tell me how to rewrite, but she did give me several ideas for how to up the pressure in the first few pages, and I wound up liking and using almost all of them. Once I put aside the initial feeling of “this is my story and it’s perfect how I have it!” having an editor telling me what could make it better was like having a private idea generator, except no one was going to get mad at me for stealing their material.

One of the other students on the MA worked as an editor for quite a while, and she says that their job is to stand in as the universal dumb reader. If things are not clear enough, they need to see that. If a plot point is overwritten, they need to see that, too. And they hand out ideas without an apparent thought to intellectual property.

I have said no to an editor before, despite how it might sound. A literary magazine wanted to buy “Chloe’s Story,” but only if I changed the ending. While the changes to “Practical Necromancy” were to the plot, and something I felt was objectively necessary, the changes to “Chloe’s Story” would have required changes to Chloe’s character, and I refused to do that, partly because Chloe herself has become a fully-formed person to me and I want her to stick around and turn up in something else I write later, and partly because Chloe got me into the MA program, got me into the Honors program in undergrad, and has netted about $30,000 US in scholarships and random cash awards, so if she gets published in the traditional way (which she hasn’t yet, since I haven’t really sent her anywhere that wasn’t waving stacks of cash in my face), I want it to be some place where other people will fall in love with her just as much as I have.

If you want to read them, “Practical Necromancy” will be coming out in an anthology of Women’s horror writing titled "Deep Cuts"  near the end of the year. You wouldn’t think it, but women are crazy underrepresented in contemporary horror; part of the submission required a recommendation of a female writer and a short horror story of theirs that I’d particularly liked, and it took me four hours of internet searches to find any female writers that could be billed as writing straight-up horror. In the end I wound up pushing one of my favorite childhood writers who happened to author the first creepy story I ever read. (Diana Wynne Jones, "The Master.")

“Chloe’s Story” can be found here, though hopefully she and the rest of the collection that she’s tied to will come out to play on their own one of these days; short story cycles seem to be enjoying a small surge in popularity, but I’m waiting to hear back from one or two special projects before I start shopping the collection around on the open market.   

Finder

The last time I was in the U.K., one of my friends in the group dubbed me "the finder," because (drumroll please)  I tend to find little things.

Frequently.

Since this has been going on for quite a while, I've got a little wooden box of the best things I've found, usually one from every important place I've been. When I'm in residence somewhere for a while, I take them out and spread them on a windowsill, as a reminder to go back to the important places.

Hopefully, this will work. After all, I did come back to the U.K.

They're also the source of some of the laziest creative non-fiction I've ever written. I chose a dozen or so, then wrote a paragraph about how each was found, tweaked them until they all played on a central theme, and then arranged them in a way that made sense. 7,500 words and deadline met in two hours.

Ekphrastic writing is traditionally based on art or music, but I've found that when I'm short on ideas, inspiration, or time, almost anything can be a jumping-off point. My college advisor's favorite game was to have us choose five objects at random and write a story that incorporated all of them. Several of my coursemates based writing on popular music, and I often plundered paintings for ideas - some of which have since been quite well-received.

And in case anyone is wondering, this is where I usually bugger off to when I do my buggering off:

Stones and strings

In short fiction the other week we took a stab at automatic writing. I doubt it was the first time for any of us, as it’s the sort of thing a professor can have a class do with no preparation, no special equipment, and that passes the time and gives her room to figure out what comes next. Not to say that’s what our professor was doing, but were I a professor that’s exactly how I'd be likely to use it. She had us fully empty our minds for three minutes, then begin with the words "I remember." It met with mixed results. Some people put down a mess of words they couldn't really use, while some of us found that the exercise skimmed the best bits off the soup of ideas we'd not yet come to grips with and got them out in the open where we could work with them.

But it brought home again the message that the best way to go about writing is to sit down and do it. There is no mantra, there is no magic, there is simply the application of butt to chair or bed or however you prefer to work, spitting out words until something useful comes up, finding the end of a thread and then following it to its conclusion. I’d been struggling for the past week or two to get down anything in the fiction mode that satisfied, and in less than five minutes of in-class exercise I not only had a lovely and gripping opening, but an intricate plan for the entire piece laid out, in this case in a zig-zag spiral patter from the center of the page. The story was there, lurking somewhere in my hindbrain, and all it wanted was a moment of pure nothingness and the two words “I remember” for me to pick up the string and begin to follow it.

In my case, unwritten stories exist as one of two types: either a pile of stones that must be made into a wall, or a string played out through a labyrinth. The stone ones are the difficult ones, as I begin only with the knowledge that I need to build a wall, and quite often without any stones at all and so must go find them on my own, or with the wrong stones or the wrong mortar and no plan whatsoever for how it should be done. Whereas with the string stories, all I must do is take up the end of the thread and follow it, winding it up as I go, so as to have a finished ball of string when I find the end of the labyrinth. The string kind, you can probably guess, I tend to like more in the moment of writing, because they are easier, more natural, as they only demand that I follow what I’ve been given without any deviation. The stone kind usually involves a lot of tears, bad masonry, and many moments in which I despair over whether they’ll ever take a proper shape at all. But when the stone kind is finished, if they turn out right, they tend more towards complexity, beauty and pattern and symmetry, with a purpose and a message and an overall feeling of craft and control.

I’ve been advised, occasionally, that I should only write the string kind, since they are faster, easier, and take up less time. But anyone who knows how this sort of thing goes, or anyone that’s read her Greek myths, knows that the gods tend to be capricious, and the Vatic Voice runs dry from time to time, for days or years without any guarantee that it will ever return. No matter how gifted we are or how string-ridden our lives tend to be, it’s always a good thing to develop our bricklaying skills. One day those bits of string I follow so easily may run out, and I’ll be left with nothing but a pile of stones and a trowel. 

Here we are, at last

The program has begun with a vengeance, for most, and a whimper for some. There’s a degree of chance in picking classes, choosing professors, and now that the chips have fallen some of us find ourselves buried in reading, while others are bewildered with what to do with all the time on their hands. The U.S. system requires more interaction for English students, more classroom time, so those of us coming from it and similar systems are doubly gratified by the amount of freedom we now have.

We have been divided for workshop, but endeavor to make up for this both by drinking together as often as possible and by holding a workshop of our own, neither of which am I involved in as much as I should be due to the amount of traveling I’ve been doing and have yet to do before I can truly settle down. The settling part has taken longer than any of us thought it would, and though we are all unpacked and know where to get our groceries from and how to get to the postgrad-only bar, we still generally feel the need to get wedged in. To move beyond resident to comfortable, to familiar, to at home and confident in our new environment. To being part of the landscape, one with the woodwork.

It’s strange to be surrounded by writers. Not people that “have a novel in them” or “might write something one day” or who “dabble a bit in poetry,” but people that struggle with the written word, read with an eye to craft, slip into the minds of invented people like slipping into their socks in the morning. And all of us are, seemingly, consumed with guilt over not writing more, reading more, experimenting more. No posers, but all workmen, with a shared technical language that I have so rarely heard, much less been able to use in company, before. There is a joy in being allowed to be frustrated because a narrative won’t get off the ground, an experiment refuses to coalesce, a novel has ground to a halt and you can’t figure out how to start it up again. And we’re able to talk about it, to work it out, over a drink or while sharing dinner and not have to translate every word.

"Over a drink" - that's a key part of it. I can't quite see this sort of atmosphere existing at a U.S. university. We're too competitive. Too image-conscious. Here there are pints and lots of hugging, and we do what we do in public or private and are proud of it. And quite often it's our professors that are doing the pouring. 

inbox candy!

Had the best of presents on my birthday the other week – offers from two different anthologies for two pieces! There’s still all the contract and editorial mess to get out of the way, but the first should come out at the beginning of November, and the second at the beginning of December. And so my summer of languishing quietly in the depths of illness without a “real job” is justified. The other two anthologies for which the contract mess has already been completed should also come out at that time, and since I’ve never done this before I’m keeping my head down and hoping that they don’t need anything else from me, as I’m not very tech adept at the best of times and school seems to turn me into a frantic Frances.

The other writers make me feel very out of my depth, as most of them appear to have finished school at only the best places quite a while ago and have moved on to teaching, moving, and shaking in the sort of places where Broadway plays and films noir are set. But my writing appears to suit, and no one’s thrown me out for being a foul impostor yet, so we shall see how all of this anthology-ing goes.