Pretty dang anticlimactic

I sat down at my desk this morning to get some drafting done. Pen, notebook, coffee, spare ink cartridges, the usual thing. And I decided to just keep going until I couldn't any more, because I haven't been getting around to drafting much since coming back to Norwich. And, much to my surprise, I finished the novel.

Cleaning off the desk, incidentally, was a contributing factor to 'not getting around to drafting much.'

Specifically, it's the novel that Ali Smith told me to go and write when I spoke with her in February of last year. Starting it was terrifying, as I hadn't written a novel since before starting uni and learning how to think in short story form - how do you fluff out a narrative that much? Somewhere in there (possibly around the end of the second black notebook) it stopped being intimidating. And I wish having written the last sentence felt momentous. But it doesn't, because all I've done is finally transcribe the end of a story I've already told myself over and over in different ways; the big payoff is that it's no longer cluttering up my head and I can think about other things. Like the degree I'm supposed to be getting.

Maybe being handed a bound proof copy of The Shore later this year will feel more like completion is supposed to.

It is 390 pages long, a bit over 100,000 words, drafted in at least nine different colors of ink (I'm easily entertained) and took six months of actual working time (most of the summer was spent skiving off and revising The Shore) and only four litres of gin. I'm not sure how much it weighs, but the notebooks were far easier to lug around than my computer, and also less prone to crashing, drop damage, and opportunistic theft. It's also quite easy to keep people from having a casual read, as I'm not letting those notebooks off my desk until they're transcribed and I doubt anyone can really read my handwriting.

This one, incidentally, also contains sex, drugs, and violence, but significantly less of all three than the previous book. It also has a single, consistent narrator, which is something most people seem to like. And now there's nothing to keep me from working on the degree novel except my crippling fear of failure and my advisor's insistence that I read books that make me cry.

I am a serious student; please do not bend, fold, stamp, or staple me.

The end of January - and the uni's grant application deadline - is rolling towards me in a threatening manner much reminiscent of storm waves on the beach before I learned to swim. The PhD has been on for about three months, but the general consensus is that it feels more like three years. Which is a bit tough, as the academic year is really only just getting rolling.

That's the one thing I don't like about academics: for everyone else, December 31st is the end of the year, a time to evaluate, drink too much, and generally relax. For those of us attached to the universities the year is only just begun, and any stab at celebrating the holidays the way the rest of the family wants you to celebrate means ignoring deadlines, ignoring responsibilities, and not feeling guilty when you mark your advisor's e-mails as 'read later.' 

Over the break I read two Phillip Roth novels: American Pastoral and Sabbath's Theater. Both made me want to stab myself in the face while simultaneously raising my standards for prose so high that I will never be able to read crime fiction again. I thought I could not hate anyone more than I hated Roth. Then I tried reading Saul Bellows. 

Roth isn't so bad, all things considered. 

I also got to hold a baby of more than usual cuteness, which made my biological clock go 'clink, clunk, go adopt a kitten' in a worrying way. And I read a bunch of fiction that was extremely relevant to my project but involved so much death that somewhere in the third week of break I found myself sobbing intermittently while ranting to bare acquaintances about how some hacks shamelessly play with readers' emotions. And I started the novel. And I narrowed down what my critical project will be about. And I made Dave eat massive amounts of pseudo-Mexican food, because going home made me miss rice and beans and there is no way to make one-person batches of pseudo-Mexican food unless you're making box enchiladas, and box enchiladas are just sad. 

So maybe I did get something done over break.

Is it obvious that I'm just avoiding writing the grant proposal?

Maybe I'm avoiding writing the grant proposal.