The Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year

... is most deservedly Sarah Howe for Loop of Jade, a stunning collection of poetry that takes inspiration from the author's dual heritage as the child of a British father and a Chinese mother and her puzzling out of her cultural identity. I'm quite glad both that she won (the collection is seriously wonderful) and that poetry is getting recognition this year, since the landscape for poets so often seems quite bleak. And, as with the Guardian prize, I wish I had found a bookie ahead of time that was running odds.

No one was told ahead of time who the winner was, so I had the chance to chill with the other shortlistees in the Art Room of the London Library. While we were chatting and sipping and trying to quell our nerves before the party I had the odd realisation that it's quite likely we four will be running into each other one way or another for the rest of our professional lives, as will many of the young writers that I've met since March; it was odd but not unpleasant to wonder who of us will park our zimmer frames close together in sixty-odd years so that we can grouse about young upstarts and publishing trends. The party afterwards was very good, though I wound up chatting to too many people to get much to either drink or eat, and was star-struck by Sarah Waters to an embarrassing degree. 

And now that the prize has run its course there is nothing between me and the mound of critical work that came down to Reading to be done during break. 

But then, the laundry does appear to be piling up... 

Literary Friction

In the midst of the skittering around of a few weeks ago I paused to drop in on the agency of Conville and Walsh and have a conversation with two brilliant people on revenge, generational issues, and the books we've enjoyed reading recently. Said brilliant people are Carrie Plitt and Octavia Bright, the minds behind Literary Friction, the radio show/podcast about books and ideas (which has an awesome name). The session I took part in went out on NTS  last week and I, of course, missed it (because I'm amazingly good at missing everything), but now it is available as a podcast for anyone who would like to have a listen (hi, Mom!) and possibly crib book recommendations. 

I have a lot more to say, but today is the day that I haul myself and my work back to Reading for the month and I haven't really slept in the past week or so, so more words will have to come when I have more brain.

Wall

I'm sitting at my desk for the ninth semi-consecutive hour of the day looking at the two undergraduate dissertations that I need to ink up in time to talk to their authors tomorrow about all the comments made on the earlier drafts that they somehow neglected to incorporate.

Earlier today I was the only person in a professional developments session on networking that wasn't a first year or running the thing. They were all so hopeful. And neatly dressed. And they all knew what their thesises (thesii?) were on. And they wanted to talk about how intimidating it was composing emails to their supervisors. And afterwards I saw them all eating pretty lunches in the postgrad space while socialising.

And I hadn't brushed my hair because I couldn't find my hairbrush and I was wearing the same clothes I wore down on the train yesterday and I hadn't packed a lunch because there was no food in the house to pack and I'd had anti-inflammatories for breakfast because spending that long on the train always makes my back cranky and I avoided them all because I had to mark up those dissertations before I ran out of steam for the day. Which, as is probably obvious, doesn't seem to have happened.

I might be inordinately proud of the fact that I didn't strangle any of them. Heck, I didn't even snap at them.

And now I'm alternating between looking at the dissertations but not marking them up and looking at the draft I owe Henry but not revising it, and taking occasional breaks to think about the work I was supposed to have done for Rachel by now and wondering if she's noticed either the draft I sent her at the beginning of November or that there hasn't been anything from me since.

I may have also paused to arrange my coterie of sock owls into comforting configurations.

The little one in the middle is squeaking 'you can do it!' Or possibly,  'if you don't do it I will invade your dreams with a machete and make you wish you had!' 

There's obviously only one thing to do in this situation...

And that is to leaf through my downloads folder

and find something relevant. Because my downloads folder always has something relevant.

And then probably wander into the kitchen,

find something vaguely good-tasting,

make a drink,

And then see how long these dissertations take me.

Aftermath: way too many words about the past week

We appear to have hit the sudden death round of term. Or that could just be an idiosyncrasy of my calendar and everyone else is bopping along the same as always; I'm never sure.

On Monday I skittered to London, first to sit down with Carrie Plitt and Octavia Bright in the Conville and Walsh office to record a segment for Literary Friction, a monthly conversation about books that airs on NTS and that you really should be listening to, then to Foyles to have a chat with Andrew Holgate ahead of the evening's readings. The turnaround between the judges selecting the winning book and the book being announced in the Sunday Times is apparently a hair's breadth, so he interviewed all four of us with the aim of being able to pop out a write-up of the winner in that gap - respect due for journalistic integrity, but I do not envy him. 

Three previous winners of the prize came to speak before the shortlistees, and I just barely managed to not embarrass myself by fawning all over Helen Simpson - "Diary of an Interesting Year" was both an influence for The Shore and used to scar my writing students; "Hey Yeah Right Get a Life" scarred me when I was a student; her stories have been my company back and forth across the ocean and in the darkest parts of sleepless nights - who I never thought I'd have the chance to meet. Andrew Cowan, who I haven't really spoken to since he supervised my MA dissertation, was also there, which was a little odd since I remember exactly nothing from that year and he appears to retain a crystal clear recollection of every moment, which is not a dynamic one wants to have with a director at one's university. 

The actual event went well, but the evening ended with Andrew and I running across London and through the underground in an effort to get to Liverpool Street Station in time for the 22.30 train back to Norwich. We made it to the station at 22.27, winded and sans dignity, to find that the train had been cancelled and the next one left at 23.30 and would take three hours to arrive owing to leaves on the track. To cut a long story short, I made it home by 3 AM having shared a drink, a train carriage table, and a taxi with Andrew, and now know far more UEA gossip than I'd thought I ever would. 

On Tuesday I woke up with the sudden realisation that, if I wanted to get to London on time for the Guardian ceremony on Wednesday, I'd better leave that afternoon. Autumn is the season of cancelled trains in East Anglia, and I've missed too many important things due to being stranded before. So I dragged myself up to pack, deal with the contents of the refrigerator, do the dishes, put in some laundry, and all of the other little things a body has to do before they leave the house for a week. 

Given how little sleep I'd gotten, I was a bit shocked that I managed to get myself in gear and out the door in time to catch the 15.30 train. Which was cancelled. But that was a good thing, because I found when I got to the station that I'd lost my railcard the night before. No one had found it, but they could make me a new one if I could get my hands on a passport photo. So I ran with my suitcase across the road to find a photo booth, cried just enough that the lady at the counter accepted my student card as proof that I was a student, and got on the 16.00 train just before it left. And then realised that I'd left my rings on the counter of the kitchen that my housemate is inevitably going to destroy this weekend, and if he can make tupperware and five gallon slow cookers vanish then a few bands of silver have no chance. 

That train was delayed, so when we finally got to London I had to fight my way off against the tide of people trying to get on, even though they had fifteen minutes before the train left to go back to Norwich. I spent twelve of those minutes in the station trying to find dinner before I realised that I'd left my suitcase with all of my work in it on the train, one minute panicking, forty-five seconds sprinting from one end of the station to the other in the hope that the train hadn't left yet, and thirty seconds babbling at rail workers in a panic as I sprinted down the platform, leapt into the carriage I'd ridden down on, ripped the damn suitcase out of the luggage rack, and fell back onto the platform a few seconds before the doors were due to lock. 

The next ten minutes were spent in the fetal position on the platform.  

So on Wednesday, when nothing happened to prevent me from getting to Blackfriars Bridge to meet Lucy in time to walk over to the OXO building for the Guardian party, I was nothing but relieved. And when we were standing on the stairs waiting to get into the party and talking about who we thought was going to win, all I wanted was to not win because I couldn't scare up any more nerve. And when it came down to it, I knew what book was going to win, because you don't announce a shortlist with "Book of poetry on shortlist for the first time in forever! Oh, there are these other five books, too" when the poetry isn't going to win. And then when it was announced that Physical was the winner I was far more satisfied than I should have been because I'd guessed correctly. 

It was an absolutely fantastic party, made just a little bit more fantastic by the fact that I (purposefully) look nothing like the one publicity photo that exists, so I got to spend the first half of the evening chatting with my publishers and my spouse-thing and taking unabashed advantage of our proximity to the door whence the food was issuing, while people who were meant to pin me down for a picture or a chat walked right past holding a reference photo taken when I had red hair.  Dave gave the game away when a woman with a massive camera and pictures of all the long-list authors came up and asked him if he was Peter Pomerantsev; it then took him an embarassingly long time to convince her that I am me. At which point I had drunk enough that talking to people wasn't scary at all, and I had a good long natter with several readers and quite a few industry people. I also at that point had no shame. Book events tend to be decorated with books, so several copies of the shortlist books were scattered tastefully around the room; this may or may not bear relationship to the fact that when I got home at 2 in the morning I somehow had the entire shortlist under my arm.

How did that get there?

And yesterday evening I had Thanksgiving dinner with my alma mater's study abroad group, caught up on the gossip back at home campus, gave out their class rings, and may have broke down sobbing when we sang the school song at the end of the evening. 

So today is, technically, the first day this week that I've got any hope of getting actual work done. But then, the kitchen cabinets could always stand to be alphabetised...

Back at the ranch...

It may not look like it, but the third year of the PhD has actually kicked off, and I've been actively participating in it.  So far, it's been a bit like going to cross the street, successfully dodging an out-of-control car, only to have a sinkhole full of bears open up beneath me the moment I hit the far sidewalk. Suddenly all of the Personal and Professional Development sessions on grant writing and job hunting are relevant and necessary, and a year isn't looking like a whole lot of time to get what I've done so far into the shape of a thesis. At some point in the past month or so the weekly beer-and-bitch session in the grad bar turned into a water-and-plan-this-conference-we-want-to-make-happen session, a different group of people cornered me in the bar while I had a fever and now I'm part of the group running the annual short story contest, and I'm scared to open any of my email inboxes.

 The first draft of Belief has been done for long enough that the feeling of accomplishment has worn off, but not so long that I've gotten around to typing it all up, which doesn't matter so much because I'm only allowed to submit 80,000 words of it at maximum. (The fact that I've groused about this at length should surprise exactly nobody). For months now I've been saying, mostly to Henry, that I need to sit down with that first 80k and give them a structural pounding before anything else useful can happen, but for various reasons ("It's summer! School is ages away!! Let's go to this festival and talk to people about books!!!) I've polished up random bits of new material to meet the past few deadlines and weathered the 'you can do better than this' lectures that they elicited.

Ok, it wasn't all laziness and butterflies; my other supervisor gave me the first week of November as the deadline to send her a reasonable draft of a 35 page journal article and I dropped pretty much everything but Shore stuff in order to get it done. Except she's on research leave and I haven't heard back from her since I sent the draft and I'm scared to message again and ask if she's seen it because I know she's going to give me another deadline that I can't make.

But I've finally gotten nervous about the ultimate deadline: October 2016 will mark the end of three years in the program and the beginning of when I'm allowed to submit a thesis. It also marks the end of my funding and the point when I really need to have figured out what I'm going to be doing, professionally speaking, after UEA ejects me from her sacred halls. And between that and Henry's almost telling off the fire appears to be lit beneath my posterior.

So how, exactly, do you turn 160,000-odd rambling first draft words into something that can be turned in without it looking like you're taking the piss? I have no idea, but here's what I'm doing:

It's been two years since I wrote the opening pages of the draft, so I honestly haven't got a clue what happens in the beginning, besides knowing it doesn't look a lot like what's on my outline. So  I sat down with the first 100,000 words of the draft and went through, page by page, writing an outline of what actually happens in the book, along with the dates because I am horrible at keeping timelines. Once that was done it was easy to see that I'd jumped all over the timeline while I was writing it, frequently revisiting earlier passages or jumping ahead to scenes I felt like writing. So I cut up the outline (all five pages of it) and put it in the order it was supposed to be in, and then used that as a guide to cut up the actual 100,000 words and put them in the order that I should have had them in in the first place. That was actually the quick part. The past few days and the rest of the weekend have been given over to the slow part: going through a paper copy of the manuscript with a needle-tipped blue pen, marking up all of the places that need to be expanded or moved or have details added, reconciling ages and dates and crossing chunks of needless waffling out, and writing up sticky notes with the details of scenes that need to be added but that I didn't know needed to be added when it was all out of order.

It's incredibly messy, and it does make me wish a little bit that I had written the book chronologically. But I've never really been able to write chronologically; more often than not, it's later scenes that make me realise what ought to have come before. And at any rate, it beats doing taxes.

The Guardian First Book Award

I must have a forgotten stash of four-leaf clovers somewhere, because it was announced earlier today that The Shore is on the Guardian First Book Award shortlist! It's one of six, and they all are excellent books; The Guardian has a piece up on the process of whittling down the list, which does not sound as though it was easy to do. The winner will be announced on the 25th of November, so I'll just have everything crossed until then.

Paperback cover: and now for something completely different!

The paperback edition of The Shore comes out in March, and the cover wizards have decreed that it shall have art all of its own. And what does that art look like, you ask?

Of the people in silhouette, I guarantee that at least one of them is planning to murder you.

So now The Shore has not one, but three covers, none of which involve glitter, a martini glass, lipstick, high heels, or any of the other elements that seem to be code for 'book by a woman for woman: do not take seriously,' which was all I hoped for back when it had no covers. And for someone that's had absolutely no hand in the process, I'm disproportionately proud of how this one looks. Hardbacks are beautiful and durable, but I really prefer the tactile experience of reading in paperback. That, and they tend to weigh a lot less, which is a significant consideration if you spend a lot of time shuffling between points A and B on mass transportation.

That and hardcovers never caused a moral panic simply because of their binding.

Surprise and the Sunday Times

I hadn't known that the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award had been revived, or that I've now been in the UK long enough to be considered a British writer by their standards and therefor be in the running, so I was more than a little shocked to find out that The Shore has made the shortlist. So now I will do my happy dance, but not for long because a shortlist means skittering down to London quite a bit over the next few weeks. One of those skitters is going to be for an evening at Foyles Bookshop on Monday the 23 of November, which will include reading and conversation from the four shortlisted authors and beer and pizza for the audience; it's free, but you have to go to their website and reserve a ticket, I'm guessing so that they'll have enough pizza if real life is anything like uni. 

The other three authors on the shortlist are Sarah Howe for Loop of Jade, Sunjeev Sahota for The Year of the Runaways, and Ben Fergusson for The Spring of Kasper Meier. Peters, Fraser, and Dunlop, the agency that is in part responsible for the prize, has bios and blurbs on their website for the curious, and two of the judges, Peter Kemp and Sarah Waters, appeared on Open Book this past weekend to discuss the books.

And I'm personally amused that the three women involved are all called Sara(h).

Parisot in retrospect: the most fun I've had in ages.

A few Fridays ago we got up at about three in the morning so we could get a taxi to the station to get the train to Gatwick to get the plane to Toulouse to drive to Parisot. Ok, Dave was the one doing the driving because if the idea of me driving anywhere other than the wide, straight, empty roads of the USA doesn't scare everyone (besides my mother) it should. I've been to Paris a few more times than I'd have liked, but I'd never seen France proper before this trip; all the fuss that people make over the place finally makes sense.

Parisot itself is a relatively small place, which reminded me of the crossroads where my parents live: the local restaurant, a few public buildings, houses tucked away from the main road. Except there was also a bakery with pain au chocolate so good I would willingly eat nothing else for the rest of my life. And mountains. And I didn't have the feeling that I'd be run off with a shotgun if I got too near someone's front porch. So, in essence, it was nothing like where my parents live unless you count the crossroads.

Since we were so far afield the speakers, the organisers, and a lot of the attendees ate together for most of the three days of the festival, which meant that the book chat began with the first arrival and didn't end until after the final speaker departed. Who was, by the by, Kate Mosse, who I'd never gotten to see before and would walk barefoot on hot blacktop to see again, talking about the importance of place to her Languedoc trilogy and her preparation and writing of The Taxidermist's Daughter. Another of the authors who spoke that weekend was Helen Dunmore, who I'd be equally willing to walk barefoot on hot blacktop to see again and who I found myself sitting next to at lunch more frequently that I'd thought possible. Though I was captivated by what they both said, it was interesting for me to watch the way in which they conducted both their talks and themselves. Like it or not, everyone needs a public face, authors probably more than other people because our private faces tend to be wholly unsuited to outdoor wear. And while plenty of people have shared their opinions on what that public face shouldn't look like (don't 'um', don't curse, don't say you have a grudge against Philip Pullman, etc.) not many have given indications what it should look like. So getting the chance to watch - Mosse with birdlike energy and bounciness, Dunmore with calm power - how women that know what they're doing do it was possibly the best part of the weekend.

After the glorious weekend of food and books we had a few days spare to poke around, so we went to Albi to see the cathedral and hear about religious oppression, and then we went to Carcassonne and heard about more religious oppression, so by the time I was getting back on the plane I'd about had it with religion in general and popes in particular. And immediately upon returning I came down with a cold, and the day after that cleared up I came down with a fever, so I'm not really sure what day it is or what's happened since France; the only sure thing is that I would desperately like to go to the festival again some year.

(If I can get my act together and get my hands on David's camera I might sling up some pictures of it all)

Finally: Parisot!

Skittering off to the Parisot Literary Festival in the morning with David in tow. I've never been outside of Paris when visiting France, so if no one ever hears from me again the safe money's on my having gotten irrevocably lost. Or chased by a cow into Andorra.

Rage against the system

At some point this summer I got an email from the university directing me to go to Blackboard to tell them whether I'd be paying my tuition this year as a single pound of flesh at the beginning or as a few ounces taken every so often. Once I'd done that, they told me to sit tight and they'd send out an invoice with a schedule for payment and directions on how to pay at the beginning of term.

The invoice that was foretold turned up in my email inbox this Monday. The payment was due on Tuesday. 

I'd known ahead of time roughly how much it would be, but it was still a bit of a pain in the butt to drop my actual work and go shuffle the contents of bank accounts in two countries. And once I'd done that I found that their online payment option wasn't working, so I got to shuffle my butt onto campus to give them the money in person. It was irritating as hell and cut a big chunk out of a day that I'd meant to spend chained to my desk working on an article, but I figured it was worth it because not paying on time meant fines, and I live in fear of screwing up enough to get kicked out. 

On its own it would have been a typical interaction with the UEA bureaucracy. Except when I got back from school and sat down to try and get work done there was another email waiting for me.

Associate tutors are contract employees, so every term we work we have to sign a new contract, even if the terms are the same as before. That's supposed to happen before the term starts. This term, that hasn't happened. We're nearly halfway through the semester and none of the tutors I know have gotten paid, and won't get paid until the end of November; most of them haven't seen a contract yet. All of them are still teaching, because they all need the money regardless of when it turns up and refusing to teach your seminar because you're not technically employed to do it comes off more as screwing over your students than anything else. 

So when I saw that my contract for dissertation supervision had finally turned up I was hopeful for a moment that the powers that be had finally gotten their collective act together. And then I read the contract. The contract which turns out to pay for exactly 3/4 of the meetings that the module outline dictates dissertations students must have. The module outline that I had to get from my supervisor the day before the first meeting because the person running the module didn't send me any information ahead of time. So I asked what gives, and the answer I got was that, basically, "that's what we pay, now sign the contract or we won't pay you." 

What can I do about it? Besides rant on the internet, pretty much zilch. 

What is wrong with these people?

The weekend has been given over to the writing of the article I was meant to send to Rachel about a month ago, which means a lot of today has involved using Google Books to search for lines I half-remember from sources I got out on Inter-Library Loan last year but couldn't use for my actual thesis draft because there's only so much insanity that can be packed into 30,000 supposedly academic words. Specifically, I spent two hours searching for the sources where I first read about the event described below, less because it was the perfect lead-in for the section of the article I'm working on and more because it's so twitch-inducing that I've wanted to use it somewhere since the first time I read about it:

There is a long history of pressure groups influencing the content of textbooks in the United States, but the history of religious and specifically Christian pressure and influence has the longest standing. An incident that goes a long way towards providing sufficient historical context is that which occurred in Philadelphia in 1844, one of many such incidents that took place in the United States at the time, which is best summarised as a lengthy dispute between the Protestant majority and Catholic minority over Bible reading in the public school. It will probably surprise a modern reader somewhat that the issue was not that the Bible was being read, but that the version used was not in keeping with the practises of the Catholic Church of the time, and both parents and bishops objected to the Catholic student minority being forced to participate.  The initial request that Catholic students who refused to read the Bible aloud in class not be beaten for their refusal was generally ignored by school officials, and further requests were met with violent anti-Catholic demonstration on the part of Protestants who believed that the failure to fully ‘Protestantise’ Catholic children would lead to a Catholic takeover of the United States.Other religious minority students, such as those of the Jewish and Quaker faiths, faced similar challenges, and it appears that the school boards generally considered having the teachers flog students who made protest on religious grounds as opposed to expelling them outright to be a more than sufficiently merciful accommodation of their beliefs.[i]

This is the sort of thing that makes me wish I could timehop a few hundred years into the future to see what our descendants think of this whole censorship matter, especially the part where adults are so determined to keep teenagers and young adults from learning about things like biology, anatomy, and critical thinking (think I'm joking? Wait until I get around to the next article). But then, if I was offered the chance to see where this goes I probably wouldn't want to take it. If the past is anything to go by, it's even odds that our descendants will be just as committed to a slightly different yet equally disturbing vein of censorship. 

 

---

[i] I haven't found all of the sources from which this paragraph draws, but the major one is Joan Delfattore, The Fourth R: Conflicts Over Religion in America's Public Schools.  (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 32-46.

What is a raven like?

The other weekend I was down in the Downs for the Small Wonder festival, and since I was down in the Downs with David in tow we naturally went to visit his mother. And since we were all there it seemed like a good idea to wander around one of the lovely little villages they have at that end of the world and generally poke our noses into things. Which is when I saw this monster:

I had to put my back against the far wall to get the whole thing in frame.

We spent most of the summer working on patching holes in the walls of the junk room so that it could be turned into an office, and it just happened that immediately prior to this trip we'd finally painted, laid a new floor, and had been debating what to do about a worktop. The practical side of me had been reconciled to the idea of Dave building something cheap and wipe clean; the other side desperately wanted something unwieldy and old. So when I saw it in one of the secondhand shops in Lewes, I may have squealed a little. Because, let's face it, no one ever passed down her wipe-clean worktop to her daughter. Wipe-clean worktops just lack something. 

The only problem is my arms aren't quite long enough to reach all those little drawers when I'm sitting down. 

So now I have a desk of more-than-ordinary-spleandour, to paraphrase Kipling, and it happens to be in an office that is finished enough to use, and when I'm done working I can close it up and lock it so that no one can accidentally tidy my outlines into the bin.

And yes, that is a model of Assateague light house on the top.

It is finished

I'm not entirely certain when I decided that I wanted to have three novels written by the time I turned thirty, but I know that it was long enough ago that even one novel seemed pretty dang near impossible.

 I do know that it was only a few days ago that I had the abrupt urge to finish Belief before I turned twenty-seven, because that seemed suddenly to be a talismanic milestone to achieve, and because I'd already missed the official deadline to finish the thing anyway.

So today I sat down, inked a bunch of pens, and stayed sitting down until it was finished, which took more words than I had anticipated when I wrote out the little yellow sticky note that told me how to finish it. Part of this is possibly because of the two completely unexpected sex scenes that I didn't know belonged near the end until I found myself writing them, but mostly I think I was scared to be finished with something so big, and scared to be without a first draft on the go for the first time since 2011. But there is only so much drain-circling you can do before you put down that last line and find that you've found the end.

It didn't kill me after all.

It's taken up two notebooks - there are only eight blank pages left in the second one - and a horrifying amount of ink - this morning alone took a converter and a half, and the pen companies love to go on about how long those things will last. I have no idea how many words it is, apart from knowing that it passed the 100k mark somewhere near the beginning of the second notebook.

Thumb for scale - the second notebook is at school and I'm not, so just imagine two of those. 

Some people talk about books like they're babies, which on a level I can understand. This one felt more like a tumour, except a tumour that I had to cut out of my self, an inch every day. And now that it's a mess sitting on the desk I have this weird empty feeling where it used to be. The urge to sit down and chip away at it is gone, because there isn't anything to chip away at.

Maybe now I'll actually get a chance to write some short stories again.

Home Straight

When I started on Belief (two years ago this month...) Henry made me write an outline for the whole book, so that I'd have some idea where I was going with it all. I don't naturally work from outlines, so while having a general map of where the story is going is somewhat helpful, I've found it doesn't really do much on the day-to-day level, since what happens next usually depends on what just happened and how it happened, and I can't anticipate how I will actually execute a planned scene enough to put it in an outline. So I've gotten in the habit, when I finish my drafting for the day, of outlining the next few scenes on a large post-it note and sticking them on the blank page, so that I'll have an idea of where I should take things when I sit down again. It's a new habit, and it's been working really well for this book, probably because I've had to put it down for weeks at a time to do other things and it's handy to know where I thought I was going when I last left off.

Outlining only as much of the story as I think I'll get around to writing the next time I write does have a drawback: it's felt, for the past six months, as though I will literally never finish this novel. Until about ten minutes ago, when I finished the morning's pages and picked up the post-its, and surprised myself by writing out what is going to happen to take the reader from where I left off to what the big picture outline says is supposed to be the end.

I'm just rolling with the assumption that there's no one alive that can read that.

So it looks like I'm almost done with the first draft of the major part of my thesis, which also happens to be the first draft of my third book. And the little voice in my head chirps up... I turn 27 next week - I wonder if I can get this finished by then?

A Henry moment

I went to go see Henry the other day for the first time since term broke up this past spring. This necessitated telling him about the book that will be published, which is, incidentally, the book that I got told off for working on when I was supposed to be working on the PhD book. But in between telling me off and seeing me again he's read a draft of the book that will be published and has essentially reversed his earlier ruling. And in so doing he came out with what I'm beginning to think of as a Henryism, which is a statement or two that is at once amusing, embarrassing, and surprisingly insightful:

"There is nothing wrong with a novel about gender and wanking."

And there is nothing that I could say to that, apart from dare him to send it in when he's solicited for a jacket quote.

Banned Book Week

Funny, it seems like 2014's Banned Book Week was only yesterday. I've made just about zero progress on my own research into banned books, but I'm still going to leave a few things here, to mark the occasion:

The ALA's top 100 banned books of the previous decade

A few words about how foolish it is to try and keep young people from reading

And a handy little list of recently banned books to remind us that we have yet to reach the age of permissiveness

And now I will return to trying to make sense of my research.

The next book

When Heinemann offered on The Shore I had a sneaking suspicion that it was a one-time triumph, and that after that first book was done and dusted I'd have to resign myself to an adulthood of actual adulting, and that any books that I happened to write after that would wind up in a desk drawer. So I am very pleasantly surprised that this isn't going to be the case just yet. The roadtrip novel I spent the summer busily revising (and for which no one, including the staff and editors at two publishing houses, can come up with a satisfactory name) has been picked up by Jason Arthur at Heinemann, and should be released (hopefully with a staggeringly beautiful title) in the summer of 2016.

The timeline for this one is much tighter than for the first - I should be dragging myself through edits before the year is over, hopefully while not under the influence of prescription anything this time, and all in all it looks like there will be a lot more hustling and a lot less sitting around. Two books in as many years is not usual in literary fiction - and my other work is showing why quite clearly - so it will probably be a while before Belief surfaces. This time around I feel a lot more relaxed about the whole thing, since I know how it all generally goes. But the biggest difference is, since the deal went through, I feel like I can call myself a professional writer now.

On a completely different note, I wonder what Henry will say...

Recovering

If ever I fake my own death it will probably be an accident, considering that this summer a few people, Lucy included, were temporarily under the impression that I'd shuffled off the mortal coil. Though I have been tempted to fake my own kidnapping once or twice before, for the sake of getting a little work done.

July was spent, as mentioned before, trying to polish off a still nameless novel, which has since been passed on to Lucy and even now is lurking in at least one reading pile that I can think of - which is probably why I've suddenly gotten so much better at keeping my phone charged and in my pocket. The day after it was handed off I dragged the Englishman to meet my grandfather, which hasn't happened before because said grandfather doesn't fly and I don't Florida, which is where he happens to have wedged himself in. It also happens that he's a retired NASA physicist, so I spent the week playing with ion mass spectrometers and scribbling down the stories he told while the two of them talked philosophy. Then we hauled butt to the Shore, with a detour along the way to fetch my little sister from summer camp, because the Englishman has never seen the Shore and I miss it.

The day after I made it back to my usual timezone, I packed up and went to Edinburgh. Which was unexpectedly lovely, given the amount of carping I've heard from people about Scotland. Besides dragging myself up Calton Hill and being treated to the unexpected sight of a dozen well-muscled men wearing nothing but kilts, I also dragged myself up Arthur's Seat, and saw the absolute worst stand-up comedy that has ever been performed anywhere by anyone. The Book Festival sticks its authors in an actual yurt when they're not in use, and since Jura was a sponsor there was a full bottle of whisky out to be poured from at will every evening I was there. The actual event in which I participated was the most enjoyable I've ever done; the chair was lovely, the audience was lovely, Michael Russell was lovely, I didn't misspell anyone's name when I signed their book, and I didn't do anything that I need to be ashamed of. Though I did manage to trigger an audience gasp of horror: the chair asked who we'd have for a fantasy dinner party; I asked if it was a party to have a nice chat or for the sole purpose of putting strychnine in the soup, because I'd been waiting for the day to poison Phillip Pullman since I read The Amber Spyglass as a child.

And almost immediately following my return from Edinburgh came the holiday weekend and the Reading Festival, where I saw bands playing live that I can't name because it'll just sound like bragging.

Even making allowances for my fuzzy math skills, I think I've had five actual working days in the month of August.

So now it's back to work. I'm hoping that, any day now, my head will break water. Though it's more likely that Henry will find out how little I've gotten done. Or rather, how much more there still is to do. I should be hauling carcass back to Norwich for the last year of the degree in a few weeks, and usually my work life takes over once I'm back. The room we began turning into an office at the beginning of the summer will be getting a floor tomorrow, so of course I'll be going back the moment that it's actually finished and useable. I have a half-hope still that having a designated room of my own, instead of working off the dining room table and being moved around constantly, will mean that I'll get more work done while I'm down in Reading, because it feels like I simply don't work enough while I'm here. Of course, the converse is equally likely to be true: I do far too much work while I'm in Norwich and if I keep up that pace something will spontaneously combust.

Heaven alone knows what will happen once I graduate and home and work find themselves merging.

Things Going On

I've been a day late and a dollar short in pretty much all regards for the majority of the year. But in the interest of seeing if I can make it to the end of December without completely admitting failure, here's a brief list of Things Going On:

#30Authors is going on right now! A review a day will be going up for the entire month of September, and I understand that at some point there will be a shot at free books.

The Shore has made the longlist for the Guardian First Book Award - and it is a tantalising list indeed. I was with my family when I found out, and even after a solid hour of explaining I'm pretty sure that none of them understand what the Guardian is...

On Sunday the 27th of September I'm going to be at the Small Wonder Festival in East Sussex, chatting with Nicholas Shakespeare about short stories and other things. The festival is held at Charleston, which was at one point occupied by the Bloomsbury Group, and which is well worth seeing on its own merit.

The Parisot Literary Festival is taking place on the 23-25 of October, and I'm going to be there for the duration!

... and as soon as I click 'publish' I'll remember a half dozen other things that should really be mentioned, but oh well.

Edinburgh!

Five years after first setting foot in the UK I've finally made it to Scotland, Edinburgh, and the Festival! Or Festivals, as it happens to be; the city is absolutely lousy with them. I've gotten about quite a bit since getting in on Tuesday night, and spent a good deal of time bumming around the Book Festival with my author badge strategically obscured feeling a right impostor. Hopefully, the event on Friday will do something about that.

At 3.30 on Friday afternoon I get to sit down with Michael Russell to read from our respective books and chat about whatever the chair and the audience thinks pertinent; at 5.30 I have the honour of being allowed to read the work of Ibrahim Qashoush as part of the Amnesty International Imprisoned Writers Series. And some time this week I might get to slow down and react to finally seeing Edinburgh for the first time - I've been traveling for three weeks now without interruption, and I'm not entirely sure that my brain cells haven't been left behind somewhere.

Houston, we have achieved orbit

I've fallen off the face of the earth this month due to an all but doomed attempt to finish a final pass on the as yet nameless novel from the MA before I go to visit my grandfather. Summer is always shorter than it looks. But I've touched down for a moment to make sure said grandfather is actually expecting me (he's a bit of a recluse; the last time he allowed someone to visit him a Bush was in the White House) and I realised that things are going on.

The Shore has (somehow, inexplicably) been nominated for Not The Booker, which is a bit of fun run by the Guardian that has for the past six years or so determined The People's Choice for book of the year in democratic fashion. Which means that anyone who wants to can mosey on over and put in their two votes for any of the 70 books on the list. It may be the final bastion of true democracy in the universe, so take advantage.

On Friday the 21st of August at 3.30 in the afternoon I'm going to be at the Edinburgh Book Festival chatting with Michael F Russell about freaky communities. Ok, I'll be at the book festival for most of that week, but if you want to heckle or sling tomatoes, that's the best time to do it. Edinburgh, as it happens, also runs a democracy-based award for first books, with the added bonus that everyone who votes gets entered in a drawing to win the entire 56 book longlist. Go and vote, because everyone likes free books. And if you don't like books they'd probably make a charming fortress.

And finally, I've been asked to natter on about the last thing I read that lit my fire for #30Authors, which is an event run by The Book Wheel where thirty writers write about their favourite recent reads on thirty book blogs over the thirty days of September. I hear there's a good chance that this could involve giveaways...

And now, back to the noveling!