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!

Little joys

I'm back to drafting the PhD novel at a respectable rate, with the reasonable hope that it will be finished in time for its autumn deadline and Henry won't have to give me that look again. It's getting to the really satisfying all-the-bits-come-together point that sometimes results in entire days being unintentionally devoted to writing. Which means that I've used up a lot of ink. So about a month ago I went online to try and replace my ink, since the only place I've found ink I like in person is in Oxford, and I really needed to lay in some new converters as I have a bad habit of cracking mine. Besides accidentally expanding my pen collection, I also found out that it is possible to buy syringes of the right size to refill cartridges.

If you want to know how I did it before, the answer is 'messily' - given the viscosity of ink, a single drop is too big to fit through the hole in a standard cartridge. 

From there, it was only a matter of time before I realised that this would let me really have fun with mixing my own ink colours. Purists may pitch as many fits as they want, the results are seriously good enough to eat, and nothing I can get pre-mixed. The table is a mess, and all of my handkerchiefs are stained, but it is a wonderfully satisfying little side-hobby. And the manuscript has turned into a rainbow.

To answer the question of why I swap colours so much - swapping pens every page or so keeps my hand from cramping, since they're all slightly different sizes and grips. They all flow differently as well, and some days only certain ones feel right. Is it weird? Probably. Does it let me write for several hours at a stretch without a break? Definitely. Do I have a fountain pen problem? Ask Dave.

A sense of an ending

In February of 2013 I started writing a novel - an actual, linear, one narrator novel - for the first time since before I started college, because Ali Smith told me to. I didn't think I'd be able finish it, so I went for the first idea I had that seemed to have potential. And I thought trying to write something long would make the exercise worthwhile enough, so I decided to ignore everything professors had tried to hammer into me over the course of five years of higher education in favour of doing exactly what I wanted to do with it, because I was frankly sick of being told 'you can't.' It was probably the most well-behaved tantrum ever. By the end of January 2014 I had produced this:

The little tan one has notes and chronologies and things, because I learned my lesson with The Shore

 Which was a bit of a surprise, because I'd abandoned it several times over the course of the first draft. And then in September 2014 I managed to turn it into this:

It was only when I finished that I realised that this one has no death and hardly any graphic violence. 

Which was too embarrassingly horrible to show to anyone, and was almost chucked out in favour of any other novel I could be writing. But it was 93,500 words long, which is an awful lot of words to just throw away, so I figured that I could make another passthrough, cut all of the dreadful parts, and possibly come out the end with a novella.

Except on July 1st I finished the passthrough by writing a new ending that actually felt like an ending rather than an arbitrary stopping point and found that, despite the fact that I had cut about five thousand words outright and moved another five thousands to a file called 'darlings' that will never see light of day, the whole thing had grown to just over a hundred thousand words, which lands it pretty solidly in 'novel' territory. And, mysteriously, I felt like it was as done as I could get it without external input.

So that's one of the two novels I need to write this summer finished, or as finished as I can get it, and sent off to Lucy to see if these bones might live. And even though I still have a horrifying amount of work to do, I have the strangest feeling that I've actually gotten something done.

And now to finished book number three!

Interview at New in Books

Before I forget again (because a day late and a dollar short has been the theme of the past three years of my life so why break the streak?), an interview I did a while back on The Shore was posted on the website New in Books on Monday! The site is, of course a great place to find out about new books - which is something I'm actively bad at, believe it or not. But even if you are one of those wizards who always knows what to read next, it's worth taking a look - there appear to be periodic giveaways.