Abstinence-only education

The Big Adult thing I've done so far this month is start the eternal quest to nail down my tax responsibilities. This so far has included chasing down accountants in two countries and getting my hands on an application for a National Insurance Number, which is the thing that lets you pay taxes to the English government instead of going to prison for tax evasion.

When I did the BA, there were several classes specifically for students that wanted to become writers, taught by professors that were themselves (to a certain point) writers. And between discussions of plot and point of view, students would inevitably have questions about the professional side of things. How do you get an agent? How do you get a short story published? How do you write a cover letter? The standard brush-off then was, "You don't need to know that yet."

The MA addressed our curiosity a bit more directly: One hour-long class was devoted to a cursory look at account keeping, finding an agent, that sort of thing. A copy of one of the professor's contracts, with the inappropriate bits covered up with thick black censor bars, was handed out as an example of something that we didn't need to fully understand yet. The agent and publisher meetings - there were six of them, each an hour long - were a bit more helpful, but they only went over what an agent or publisher does and how to find one. Everything after that point was a hazy terra incognita that we would find out about when we needed to know about it - the way it was phrased made it sound as if, the moment we signed a contract, we would instantaneously and magically understand everything pertinent to being a professional writer.

A month or so ago I signed my contract. I made sure my publisher bought me dinner first. It was a very nice dinner. I've never been on an actual date, so I can't compare, but if I were going to go on a date I would want it to be half as nice as that dinner. And now, unexpectedly and far younger than I was told to expect to, I have reached that 'later' that all of my professors told me that I needed to wait until before I worried about the technical stuff.  Not knowing isn't going to make me not responsible for making sure the right countries get their cut on time. Which makes me wonder, did they think that if they didn't tell me how to deal with this that it would prevent me from ever needing to find out?

Finish line in sight

Yesterday I hit 98,000 words on the current novel. Which is about 13,000 words farther than I thought it would go, and I still have a handful of plot points that have to be included before we can hit the diminuendo and the "Good Night, Gracie!" And while it's easy to open it up and keep on going, I'm really wishing that it were finished already, because it's so easy to just open it up and keep on going.

I hate beginning, and I hate beginnings, and I hate wasting ink on the twenty thousand or so words of drain circling that it takes me to find the voice I'm looking for. And when I'm back at the beginning again, it's hard to remember that the beginning will ever be anything but shit. Which is why having something that's been almost done for a few months now is really dangerous: it's just easier to keep going with the really familiar, comfortable plot and characters than to do the research or write the opening of any of the things I'm actually supposed to be writing. Like the PhD novel that Henry thinks I'm already well into. Or the novel for Crime Fiction that Henry thinks I'm already well into. Or really, anything that can be slid in under the heading "things that my supervisor thinks that I'm working on."

The fact that it's 98,000 words without being done, by the way, is Exhibit A in the ongoing discussion of why I don't do NaNoWriMo. It's a discussion because everyone I know does it, and everyone I know that does it turns into a proselytizer when I say that I never have and probably won't. And the numbers are the 'why.'

On a day that I get absolutely nothing done, including putting on clothes, I draft 1,500 words. When I have something to avoid doing, can't sleep, or get really into it, it's more, but on the worst day it will be a solid 1,500; math it out, that's at least 45,000 a month. The goal of NaNoWriMo is a 50,000 word novel in 30 days; even when I was writing them out in Marble composition books, I haven't written a novel that ended in 50,000 words. I could double it up and maybe get out a complete novel in the alloted time, but I'd be pretty well cooked for the next few months, and nothing else would get done. Or I could call it finished at 50k and never mind that the story is only half done. But a novel is a novel and the goal of the exercise is to write a novel in a month while creating the habit of writing every day. It's a great idea and a fun exercise and brings people together into a support network, but it isn't really something I need right now. It's not that I can't find the time, just that I've found something that works better for me.

Now if only this bastard would complete so I could move onto something with an actual deadline...

To London, to London, jiggity-jig

I keep winding up in London, unintentionally, for purposes that are not entirely work-related. Not that I'm complaining.

Monday was a double-barreled trip, in that I had the early afternoon to find an accountant - my housemate says 'find' is the wrong verb, because they don't grow like mushrooms in the forest to be picked willy-nilly by passersby, but what does he know - and the evening to find a particular little subterranean bar in Soho where Windmill was throwing wine at its 2014 novelists. Neither of which are particularly daunting, unless you feel like an impostor and keep expecting someone to send you to play with the finger-paints until nap time.

"Finding an accountant" consisted of getting lost in a dodgier-looking part of Camden for a good half-hour, then having the reincarnation of Winston Churchill repeatedly explain that I need a national insurance number and everything I spend money on regularly is tax deductible. My family keeps trying to pass me on to accountants that they know socially, but the one thing that the professors at the UEA have not hedged on recommending is finding someone that specializes in writers and other creatives that are horrible at numbers - while I was sitting in the reception area, a woman wearing an expensive wool birds nest as a dress came in and left two shopping bags full of receipts and other papers and said, "see you next quarter!" while walking out.

And the Windmill Party - publishers, publicists, sales people, agents, Waterstones representatives, and a smattering of rather shy authors in a tiny bar decorated with next year's paperbacks. The decor was functional - five of the authors whose books had been scattered on the tables, shelves, and mantlepiece read during the evening. At first, people picked up the books, flicked through them, and put them down carefully before determining that no one was looking and sliding them subtly into handbags. Then Jason stood up and invited everyone to take as many as they wanted - and the vultures descended. My picture of the London publishing scene now consists of very well dressed people, wine glasses in hand, jumping over each other to get unedited proof copies of next year's books and cramming as many as they could fit into their bags - Windmill brought tote bags for everyone, it was that kind of event. A bit like a strip club for bibliophiles, except you got to take the girls home afterwards.

Besides the oodles of free books, the gallons of free wine, standing next to Sebastian Faulks and hearing Nick Harkaway read from Angelmaker (it is goooooooooood, trust me), my high point of the evening was meeting David Vann.

This bears explanation.

David Vann wrote Legend of a Suicide, a collection of short stories and a novella that explore some very concentrated territory that you might be able to guess from the title; what you probably won't be able to guess (spoiler) from the title is that the book contains about one hundred pages of a man dragging the decomposing body of his dead son through the Alaskan wilderness. Short stories are not meant to be consumed in marathon sittings. Short stories about suicide, probably even more so. Legends was a set text for Theory and Practice of Fiction last year, so (surprise!) I read it in a week, and then spent the next few months trying to cope with what I read.

So, when I found out that he was at the party, I went and found him, and told him that I would never forgive him for that book. And then we talked about Medea adaptations and castration in fiction. He's pretty cool.

A shoebox of one's own

I may have mentioned before the two things all STEM PGR students say that makes me want to do my weasel in a henhouse imitation: "Of course you have funding, everyone has funding!" and "so where's your office?" Apparently, watching partially cooked beetles have sex nets you cash and a desk of your own, while researching the effect of censorship on education doesn't, but eh. The first issue was fixed with the successful unloading of my BFA dissertation, (more commonly known as 'the reason I never left my room senior year') and the second issue got a patch-fix yesterday. True, there is a desk in my bedroom - in fact, I'm typing this while sitting there - but working in the same space you eat, sleep, read trashy novels and shoot head-crabs on the weekends quickly starts feeling a lot like wearing the same dirty pajamas for days on end. It's just not that nice.

The reason I'm in a good mood today

Somewhere in there I had the realization that I'm never going to get any respect - undergrads aren't as good as masters students, masters aren't as good as PhDers, PhDers aren't as good as professors or postdocs, and when you finally make it to the top of the pile the whole world gives you side-eye because they think that what you're doing is pointless and why didn't you become a scientist, you drain on society? But one of the privileges of Humanities research students is the monthly (yay!) study carrel - a desk, a lamp, a window, and a chair, with enough space to get in and out of the chair, and a door that (oh joy, oh rapture) locks. It's not an office, you have to get on the waitlist again every month and do a good bit of moving around, but it still counts as a space of one's own, a lockable space where quite a few of my books are now waiting for me, and where I actually get work done because there are literally no distractions. And the more keys on my keychain, the more I feel like a real adult.

Block it out.

I've never outlined a novel - which probably shows glaringly if you read the early drafts of The Shore. I make rough plans some times, then lose them, forget them, have bad things happen to the notebook they were written in.

At our first meeting, Henry told me to rough out a plan for the book I'll be writing for the 'Creative' requirement of the degree. Which seemed like a pretty simple task until I looked at the paper. How do you plot a non-linear timeline in multiple voices?

This is supposed to be a learning experience, and heaven knows that I need to learn how to plot out ahead of time (so that I stop forgetting what setups at the beginning are waiting to pay off at the end), but if no one ever hears from me again, it probably means that I was never meant to outline and my attempts have opened a mystic portal into another dimension and I will never be seen again.

Have you tried turning it off and then on again?

I'm a week into the PhD, and I've come to the conclusion that the administration is broken. Bluescreen Red-ring-of-death stab Caesar and ride off into the sunset singing "Oklahoma!" broken. Either that, or it really is an old boy's club where you pay your dues by figuring out what you're supposed to be doing and faking it until then.

For the first time in my academic history, the bare minimum is no longer "show up," and that's both thrilling and terrifying. I've got a rough list of things I have to do before I can graduate in three years - mostly personal and professional development courses, but some of it looks fun - and they're leaving me and my supervisor to get to it; the first real deadline I have is the upgrade panel in May. Which is already terrifying, as I have to deliver the revised draft of my novel to my publisher in March. My approach to revision is to occupy the living room couch for ten hours a day six days a week until it's finished, which is a great way to revise but isn't really great if I'm supposed to be doing anything else at the same time. Like remembering to eat regularly. Or producing the material required for an upgrade panel.

So, what does a UEA PhD in Creative and Critical writing look like in the first week? And what exactly am I doing with my time?

Pictured: my initial background reading: books at the back, JSTOR articles at the front. There would be more, but the Library has a 20 book limit. Also the novel I'm almost finished drafting. Also the glass I clean pen nibs in. Also my pocket flask - I swear it's empty. Also my Phi Beta Kappa cords. 

First (and foremost, because I can't fake knowledge for once), I get to audit Henry's crime fiction class - I'm not sure if this is voluntary or forced, because he is my primary supervisor and I'm pretty sure I was going to have to do it at some point. There isn't too much reading to do, but he makes up for that by tossing out writing assignments as we leave class (ten minutes late). This week I'm supposed to come up with a detailed outline for a crime novel and a decent first paragraph.

Second, there are the PPD seminars, which I finally get to sign up for by myself and attend by myself, though Henry is supposed to make sure I do enough of them to graduate on time; they sound both useful and time-wasty at once, but I don't know for sure just yet.

There's also the weekly research seminar, where we all come together and talk about What We've Been Working On. That started yesterday, but I'm still not so sure what is supposed to be accomplished in those sessions.

The big thing, though, are the supervisor meetings, which happen every few weeks and consist of Henry or Dr. Potter talking and me scribbling down furious notes and trying to spell writers' names correctly, then trudging to the library to take out books, print out JSTOR articles, and wonder if I can ILL things or if I have to buy them. I'm still getting through the reading and doing what they told me to do part; right now that consists of "getting to grips with the history of censorship" and plotting out the novel I'll be writing.

I'm happy that I made it this far, but I periodically stop and scream in horror at the mound of books on my desk.

Oh baby

It's been a bad weekend, begun with bad news from home conveyed badly (note to family: I'm five hours ahead and there is literally nothing I want to find out about over social media first), and concluded with grief bacon and grief drafting. But now that it's Monday and, as far as I know, everyone important has been told, I can say what's happening with my irradiated baby.

After a lot of back and forth and more transatlantic phone calls than I care to think about, my work has a publisher in the UK, US, and Canada, which shocked me a bit as I'd been told to consider myself very lucky if I landed one in any one country. Here in the UK I get to work with William Heinemann, which feels a bit weird, since I've walked past the Random House building on my way to Tate Britain so many times and never imagined that I'd be invited inside. In the US I belong to Hogarth, which is an imprint of Random House US but was (apparently) begun by Virginia Woolf and has died and been resurrected since then - a fact that I still squee over whenever I think about it. In Canada it's being published by Bond Street, Doubleday. At some point in the next few weeks I get to wander down to London to meet everyone at Heinemann, and a few weeks after that I should start getting revision notes. And I still feel like someone should come along and take me back to the finger-painting so the adults can get their work done.

The current working title is "The Shore," but I'm hoping that someone in editorial will come up with the kind of title that sticks in your head for the rest of your life - A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Gravity's Rainbow, 100 Years of Solitude; different ones probably do it for you. My sixteen-year-old sister summarizes it as being about sex, drugs, and wild ponies, and while those things occur where necessary, she left out the murder, plotting, and reconciliation that also happens. It's scheduled for release in 2015 in all three countries, though probably at different times, and though it's been fully drafted for about a year now I'm looking forward to the massive amounts of editorial that will happen between now and then. My advisor and I called it my multi-limbed, multi-headed, irradiated demon baby, and while it's looking a lot more like a novel and a lot less like a random collection of violent events, it could still stand to be poked more into a traditional baby shape.

After a skim of all of their books, it looks like there's about a 5% chance of getting a "Chick Lit" cover. Which is about as important as having an ugly baby, I guess. Or maybe more important, since a lot of women and most men tend to avoid Chick Lit, and my book is pretty certain to disappoint anyone looking for the sort of lighthearted story you usually get under a pink cover with glittery writing and a single graphic image - a martini glass, a high heel, a tube of lipstick, you know the drill. So great publishers, great editors, and a shot at a cover that I won't be embarrassed of.

Now if only I could convince my parents that they really don't want to read it.

The downside of drafting longhand

The sky was peeling... pearling...pearing? What the hell is this word? Oh, paleing.

Wait, I like pearling better. Now, is the next bit a coffee smudge or an actual word?

More Metaphysical Bullshit

Honesty is funny. Bluntness is funny. Specifics are funny. Don’t try to be funny, but if you happen to be, don’t fight it.

Pour your physicality into your stories until you run out of life. Think on the prism of isms: don’t let the isms drive you, but take advantage of the tension they give. Don’t use stereotypes as a free ride, use them to add depth. Don’t write a character that is racist because he’s a redneck, explore the connection between the redneck’s social identity and his beliefs. Keep things surprising. If you feel too strongly about something, or want to use your story to further some pet ism, stop. Don’t corrupt your writing in that way.

Facts are not truth. But sometimes you can present both fact and truth, in a single statement. “Leaning on another person for the first time in her entire life –” is this a fact or a truth? Though in context it is a physical action, it also has metaphorical ramifications; it is both fact and truth. Poetry is known more for its double and treble and quadruple meanings, but that doesn’t mean we can’t get that out of fiction. We write every line, we want our readers to read every line, so we should revise every line to have the most weight for its word count, to have clout.

Don’t be restricted by the forward flow of time. You can riff off of what’s already happened in the middle of showing what’s going on, or you can look forward to what your characters have yet to experience. You control the timeline, work it. You don’t have to say everything, and you don’t have to reveal everything, and neither do your characters. Let them say something, and then continue the line of thought internally. Let them say one thing and think another. Let them say one thing and do another. Keep something back.

Learn to use your whole language, not just the words you use every day. You will have an ear for the language that you speak, the language that your parents speak, the language you grew up with. You will also have an ear for the language that you read, the language in which you think you should be writing. Use them both, balance them and play them off each other. You don’t have to write like an Englishwoman, in a café, or on handmade paper. Write like you speak. Write like other people speak. Write the stories that you feel pressured to write, pressured from the inside rather than the outside. Take an idea, repeat it, expand it, like ripples in a puddle, seeing how far you can stretch it. Don’t let your fear get in the way.

There is an inverse relationship between the cleanliness of your house and your word count.