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. 

 

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[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.