I'm not dead yet!

...though I'm not exactly feeling better. The cough I picked up in America in October has stuck around to make life difficult, so the frequency of getting things done has halved, and the rate of not being able to care that I'm not getting things done seems to vacillate at will.

Fortunately, other things have been vacillating as well - there were difficulties hunting down an external examiner, so my hand-in date has shifted to January 20th, which happens to be my dad's birthday. Which means that I don't get to move home just yet, but at least I get another month to work on the thesis. No matter how finished it gets I'll always be able to spend one more month on it, but given the amount of time I've spent coughing instead of working this term the delay is something of a blessing.

The academic conference that's been in the works for the past year will finally come to pass on Saturday, and I've got everything crossed that it goes off without any major upsets. I'm not presenting, but running the thing is so much effort that I wish I were. But the experience has been worthwhile, and I'm pretty sure that the feeling of getting back the brainspace that's been devoted to conference things will be nothing short of transcendent.

Oh, and there's a fiction-adjacent side-project that I've somehow gotten drawn into as a side effect of being involved with the conference. But that's all I'll say about that until it's ready to bear fruit. Which, by the look of things, shouldn't be long at all.

The most positive of feedback

I have a friend. Her name is Fran. Fran is an artist and graphic designer.

When I was working on The Lauras, Fran threatened to read it.

And when it came out, she read it.

And apparently she liked it, because she made an art of Alex and Ma (that's a technical term).

And there was much rejoicing, because she drew Alex to look pretty much the way that Alex looks in my head.

And also because my book inspired fanart, and that is high praise indeed.

Italy, Day 2: Venice

I had thought that my foray abroad would continue in the manner of the first day, and I'd find periodic quiet moments for getting work done, updating social media accounts, and suchlike. As is so often the case, I was very wrong about that. So the rest of the account of Italy is about a week late.

When I woke up in Treviso I had all the intentions of going out and seeing the town a bit before heading on to Venice, but when I popped out onto the street I found that it was raining. And not English mizzle, but the kind of rain that you see in Virginia at the tail end of a hurricane. So I went back inside the hotel and drank coffee and wrote for a while. But eventually my worries about not finding the correct train won out over my dislike for getting rained on, and I dragged myself out to find the train station and, since everyone else seemed to have one and they all seemed to look at me like I was crazy for wandering around without one, an umbrella. I managed to do both of these things without actually speaking, and then managed to check out of the hotel and get myself onto the correct train to Venice also without speaking, so I've added 'move to Italy and become a voluntary mute' to my list of possible career choices if writing doesn't pan out.

About halfway to Venice I had a strange moment. The carriage was full mostly of women, and even though I've spent a lot of time in train carriages full mostly of women this was the first time that I looked around and all of the women had the same yellow-green tone to their skin that I do, and the same ill-behaved hair that I do, and more or less the same nose and eyes and awkward body proportions. And while I don't usually find myself surrounded by people that look that radically different from me, I do generally find myself surrounded by people who are more Nordo-Germanic looking than me, so it was the first time that I've ever looked around and thought, I guess I am normal.

Venice itself looks exactly like the pictures, except it feels smaller and cosier than it's generally described to be, at least in my opinion. I had a few free hours before the evening's event, so I wandered around getting lost and rained on and looking into churches while trying to keep my umbrella from blowing inside out. I couldn't actually read the map that I was given of the city, so I accidentally found the Basilica of Santa Maria dei Frari, and also the Church of San Pantalon - which I personally thought was more impressive because the entire ceiling is painted to depict the martyrdom of Saint Pantalon. I also found the church of San Geremia, which houses the remains of Saint Lucy of Syracuse, which I was not expecting to see when I went in.

Yup, those are remains. Image from Wikipedia, because I draw the line at photos in churches. 

I was scheduled for an evening chat at Libreria Marco Polo, but the rain meant the trains were delayed, which meant that Rossella, the publicist who was coming to meet me; the interviewer; and the translator were all delayed, the latter two extremely so. This was dealt with by repairing to the nearest bar for a drink, asking around until someone who spoke both English and Italian was found, and having one of the booksellers do the interviewing until the actual interviewer turned up. Afterwards the chairs were cleared away and furniture rearranged, two boards laid across sawhorses in the middle of the bookshop, and an immense dinner of Afghani food laid out. We stayed up until one in the morning drinking wine and talking about books, which was probably a little ill-advised, considering that we had to wake up at five the next morning to catch the train to Milan.

In retrospect, it's pretty understandable why I couldn't drag myself out of bed the day after getting back from Italy. I don't think I slept more than five hours a night any night I was there.

Italy, Day 1: Treviso

I want to be an adventurer, probably because I read too many books as a kid which focussed on adventurers. The problem with this is that I am, by nature, a timid person who lives in terror of making mistakes and gets along just fine not speaking to another person for days. So when Lucy asked me if I would like to go on a book tour in Italy, the part that has delusions of dragonslaying said yes while the rest was trying to find the courage to say, "...is that such a good idea?" But no one ever became an adventurer by staying home, and I figure if I keep doing things that terrify me then at some point I'll simply run out of terrifying things to do, and then everything will be easy.

A canal in the rain.

Thursday morning I was convinced I'd never make it out of the country: I seem to have a travel curse where Italy is concerned, every plan I make to visit gets cancelled; on top of that I'd come back from the US on Tuesday with a wicked cold and couldn't wrap my head around the travel details that were in English, let alone all of the ones that weren't. In my defence, the times on all of my tickets and the times on my itinerary didn't agree, which would probably make anyone nervous. There was panic about missing my flight on the bus, the train, the tube, the other train, and all through check-in, and then there was a brief respite followed by panic on the flight and all the way to the hotel that I wouldn't go to the right place and there wouldn't be anyone to translate and I'd be sent home in disgrace. There was so much panic over logistics, in fact, that when it actually came time to speak to a roomful of people I couldn't find it in myself to even worry.

A different canal in the rain.

The first place I went was Treviso, which everyone described as a small town but which pretty well awed me. It looked like all of the descriptions I've read in novels set in northern Italy, so it was like arriving in a familiar town that I hadn't seen in a long time, which is similar to how I felt coming to Britain for the first time. It probably added to the sense of familiarity that the hotel they put me in was decorated a lot like my aunt's house, down to the gilt wall sconces.

It's probably time to get a new camera: that's a marble floor, the doors are marquetry, and the furniture is antique. Also, gilt everywhere.

I'm pretty sure my aunt has actually had those wall sconces at some point. The marble-topped nightstand and alligator album she's definitely had.

The evening was chaired and translated by a wonderful woman called Rosanna Martinelli, who teaches literature in English and who I found accidentally as I was coming down the stairs of the hotel, determined to be an adventurer and do some adventuring, just as she was coming up the stairs to find me since I hadn't answered my room phone. Live translation is difficult and time-consuming in the best circumstances, so we plotted out a good part of the discussion beforehand, so that she could focus on translating what I said into Italian without having to translate everything she said into English first. The evening was held in a gorgeous medieval building (as close as I can tell) and seemed to go over well - there were quite a few questions and several very positive comments. So all in all day one went much better than expected. And I managed to get coffee and get myself on the correct train this morning, so so far I'm ten for ten if you ignore the cold.

My mom asked for pictures. Hi Mom!

A passing thought

Hitting 'send' on the email that gives the accountant my books for the tax year feels just as momentous as hitting 'send' on the email that gives my publisher a new book.

 It probably wouldn't feel like such a big deal if I kept my books up to date throughout the year and kept all of my expense documentation in one place, but I don't seem to have the personality that's capable of doing it - though I did resolve at the beginning of the year to not loose my receipts and seem to have more or less managed to do so for once. It would also probably be easier if I started compiling them earlier in the year, rather than thinking I'll get it done in the lazy days of summer that never seem to come.

Maybe when I'm finally finished with school and only have one job I'll finally get on top of it.

All things must come to an end

Today is the first day of my last term as a student (unless I bollocks it up) and marks four solid years since I came to Norwich, sight unseen, armed with a blank notebook, a woollen jacket of insufficient thickness, and the intention of whacking my head against the metaphorical wall until one of the two broke or someone made me stop. Looking back, I'm shocked that it was the wall that gave way, rather than my head, and not just the wall of the university's ivory tower but that of publishing's looming fortress: I never thought I'd make it this far.

I came to Norwich in 2012 with the hope that I'd get a year to breathe: to write, to recover from the illness that had kept me pretty near insensate for six months, to spend time in a country I loved but didn't think would have me and in the same timezone as someone who I loved but who wouldn't let me compromise on my goals for it. I've stayed for longer than I planned, done more than I thought was possible - in fact, pretty much everything I dreamed of doing, except for the 'breathing and resting' part. I thought by now I'd be back in the States, working a dead-end job with health insurance too expensive to actually use and writing stories no one would ever read in my free time. I still feel like an impostor, but it's a simple fact that, if I am, I'm an impostor with two published novels and a thesis in its final stage of revisions,  who trembles at the unknown but jumps into it anyway on the off chance that it will be interesting.

At the end of December I should be turning in my thesis and moving down to Reading. What happens after that, I'm not sure - doubtless the viva and the revisions and the handing in of the final dissertation will take up a lot of time and account for endless fannying about. I'm looking forward to waking up in the same town every morning for a month, and I keep daydreaming about what I'll do when I'm finished, making little lists of the books I want to read and places I want to explore and foods I want to feed Dave while I'm in the post-handin limbo. After that, who knows?

Already I'm sad about the prospect of leaving Norwich. It's been a lovely place to become an adult. It's been a good place to become a writer. I hope it will be a great place to come back to, just as much as I hope I'll have plenty of reasons to come back.

It's not over yet though. And tonight, there will be fencing.

Book Tour!

I'm one of those people that's superstitious about talking about an opportunity until it's pretty certain that it's going to happen, which is why I'm only now saying anything about this: I'm going to be scooting around Italy in October!

The Shore was released in Italy yesterday under the title Tutto il Nostro Sangue, because the nuances of 'shore' don't translate.

I'm probably a little too happy that the version my aunts will read has 'blood' in the title.

So, for the purpose of getting to meet me and talking up the book, my Italian publisher has decided to ship me over for a week in October.

I'll be at the CartaCarbone Festival in Treviso on the 13th of October, then the Marco Polo bookshop in Venice on Friday the 14th, Le Notti Bianche in Pavia and Volante in Lecco on the 15th, Il Mio Libro in Milan on the 16th, and Minimum Fax bookshop in Rome on the 17th.

Considering that I've tried and failed to visit Italy several times over the past decade and a half, I'm more excited about the trip than terrified. The only real issue is that I'm pretty rubbish at languages - In school I studied French for two years, Spanish for five, and Italian for seven, and can navigate exactly none of them. Though they say that finding oneself in a position where one is forced to use the language results in a dramatic increase in understanding.

On the plus side, I'm going back to Virginia for my brother's wedding the week before, so I'll have the chance to refresh the basic phrases ahead of time. Assuming that I can get my uncle to stop worrying about my personal safety long enough to teach me.

Highlights of Edinburgh

Since coming back from Edinburgh on Monday I've had the worst time trying to stay awake, which probably means that the summer has finally caught up to me. Last year my first book had just come out, I knew no one, and I had to leave David at home, so I was generally shy and terrified throughout the festival. This year David came along, I kept running into book people I knew, and even though I was nervous about discussing The Lauras for the first time I had a rough idea of how the evening would go. 

Highlights of the trip include:

- Chatting with Gavin Grant and Olivia Smith, and listening to Kevin Barry's stories about minks, mice, and other vermin. 

- Spending an embarrassing amount of time in the Author's yurt trying to get in as much shop talk as possible. 

- Drinking pints of whisky with Jenni Fagan and Stuart Kelly after the yurt had closed and all sane people gone to bed.

- Dragging Dave to the top of an extinct volcano only to hear American accents. 

- Dragging Dave to eat cranachan and haggis only to hear American accents.

- Fangirling shamelessly over Marcus Sedgwick.

- Getting through my first reading from The Lauras without messing up or cursing. 

- Buying books when I'd promised I wouldn't. 

As the more social of the two of us, Dave made friends with pretty much everyone he came across, and now wants me to hurry up finishing the next book so we can go back. 

Edinburgh!

The Lauras was released on time, and if there were any negative reviews then I haven't seen them - and it would probably be good if it stayed that way, as I was a basket case for the week leading up and the week after publication. And now I'm a bit of a basket case again, because on Thursday I'll be at Edinburgh Book Festival, reading from and talking about book the second for the first time, and dammit if I don't have the slightest clue what questions, from audience or chair, the whole thing will lead to. In honesty, the only reason that I'm not hiding under the bed is that I've been paired with Jenni Fagan with The Sunlight Pilgrims, and there's a good chance I'll spend too much time asking her questions about her books to answer any about my own.

Dave gets to come along this time; I'm far too excited about getting to show him the yurt.

External validation

The Lauras comes out tomorrow, which means I'm halfway to a quivering ball of nerves - though that may be the six cups of black coffee that I've just drunk. It's not that I'm worried that the book will be badly received, because on a fundamental level I believe that the writing is the important part, and it being read once it's finished is somewhat superfluous. But I do have a fair amount of impostor's syndrome when it comes to my fictive tendencies, so the days leading up to a proving point, when something new goes out into the world and people are asked to respond to it, aren't exactly relaxing. I'm not sure what it is that's got me uneasy - but then, even though I can't say  what it is about cloudy water that makes me uneasy I still won't stay in the bathtub after it's gotten too soapy to see the bottom.

In the positive column I've got a firmer idea of what's going on than I did last time, and I've got enough of a reference point to know that what's going on is so far all good.

Yesterday I got to scoot into London to record a segment for BBC Radio 4's Front Row, which means that, as with The Shore, my first time talking about The Lauras was in a recording room with Kirsty Lang. Which was the best possible way to start things off, because Kirsty is wonderful. It's too early yet for me to have a solid idea of the sort of conversations the book will prompt, or to have well thought out responses to them, so her questions are my primer for what I should be thinking about as Edinburgh draws nearer and other speaking opportunities pop up.

The thinking is going to need to happen quickly, as I'm going back into London tomorrow afternoon for an interview with Radio Gorgeous, which is unexplored territory for me.

Text-wise, there have been good reviews in the Sunday Mirror, the Sunday Times, and Stylist Magazine, with rumblings of more to come. Even though no one's panned it as far as I've seen, I'm quite tempted to put my head down and pretend that none of it is happening. The writing is really the fun bit, and the thesis clock is ticking.

West Cork Literary Festival

Despite living in the UK for the better part of six years, I've only managed to get over to Ireland twice so far, even though the flight is shorter than the train journey to Norwich. My first thought on landing in Cork airport was that this is a problem that needs remedying, preferably with David in tow, as he hasn't really seen Ireland either. It's not so much that the southwest coast is beautiful - everyone knows that - as that it is my kind of place: quiet and slow and hidden, coastal with lots of space for walking and getting lost.

The festival was held in the town of Bantry, which was big enough for me to get lost in more than once but small enough that I really shouldn't have been able to. Since it was such a trek the festival let me come across a day early, which meant that I had an evening and a morning in which to get lost.

The reading took place on Whiddy Island, which looks like this:

The other writer was Horatio Clare with Down to the Sea in Ships, who is a character. We scooted across to the island an hour early to get ourselves settled in, which consisted mostly of talking books and teaching, being anxious, and getting sunburned. That was when I found out that I should probably update my author photo: he'd spent the evening before drinking with the festival organisers and other writers, and even though they knew for certain that I'd made it to Bantry, no one had been able to spot me, or been certain that they'd spotted me, because they were all looking for red hair. 

Most of our nerves were due to neither of us being able to remember if we had a chairperson for the event, which is the difference between an easy-bordering-on-fun undertaking and an event in which I am guaranteed to faint, so we were both incredibly relieved when Sue Leonard turned up on the ferry along with the audience and said that she'd be running the show so we needn't worry. We read, we talked about misogyny and violence and the sea, and all in all it was a lovely way to put The Shore to bed, as this was most likely the last time that I'll get to talk about it more than in passing. The Bantry bookseller managed a little black magic and had copies of The Lauras for sale, which gave Sue and I both a moment of anxiety when we saw them because she hadn't read it and I hadn't prepared it and we were both certain that it wasn't the book that we were meant to be talking about but there it was. 

Afterwards I got the chance to chat with some of the audience, which is always fun, and finally met Sara Baume, who wrote Spill, Simmer, Falter, Whither, and with whom I share an agent, a publisher, and a name. And after that I got to hear Zadie Smith and Nick Laird read their work and talk about writing, which brought about something not far off a moment of perfect happiness. Which was good, because after that I discovered that somewhere along the way I'd picked up a case of food poisoning. Which is half the reason why it's taken me nearly a week to say anything on the wonder of West Cork. The other half the reason is the sudden burst of little things to do before The Lauras comes out next week but which I haven't really had the energy to do. 

At least I'm back in Reading for a little while - this may be the first Saturday I've woken up here in five weeks - and with any luck will turn back into myself soon.

French Shore

Just found out that the French edition of The Shore is being released on November 14th! The cover is lovely, of course:

This makes four covers, for anyone keeping track.

And now I understand why Lucy wants me to space my books out a little bit more. Every time I think we've moved on to the next thing, something else happens with the last thing.

Full circle

When I was seven or so we got a book out from the library that was illustrated in the style of an illuminated manuscript. It was the first time I'd ever seen that art style, and I became obsessed with it.  Compared to all the other illustrated books I'd read it was like seeing in colour for the first time; it satisfied a need for order and complexity and beauty that I hadn't realised I had.

The notes on the illustrations mentioned books of hours and the Book of Kells. I had no idea what a book of hours was, but 'Book of Kells' sounded enough like a specific title that I asked a librarian at my tiny local branch if they had or could get a copy. She told me that it lived at Oxford (good guess, it's at Trinity College) and that only researchers and doctors were allowed to touch it; a colour reproduction of anything but the Chi Rho page was similarly out of reach.

So I decided that I had to get a doctorate so they'd let me visit the book. And over the years I collected books on illumination and celtic knotwork, learned calligraphy and got to hold a book of hours, but the want never went away: I must get a degree; I must get to read the Book of Kells. It was a low-level obsession, but it was indeed an obsession.

Last year Dave and I went to Dublin for our first anniversary, and we took an afternoon to wander slowly through the exhibition on the book, how it was made and who had made it and what had happened to it afterwards. And I finally got to see it: the four gospels, each open. They were under glass, and I figured that was the closest I'd ever get to my desire to look at every single page.

Then Trinity College digitised it. All of it. Even the backs of the decorated pages so you can see how the colours bled through the vellum and the words on the facing page transferred over.

So I've spent today flicking back and forth between my doctoral thesis and the four gospels, working towards the degree that I decided I couldn't live without because I thought it was the only way to see the book that I can now spend as much time as I want paging through without leaving my desk. It's been twenty years. The satisfaction is unspeakable.

From Trinity College's Digital Collections

Finished copies!

Look what came in the post!

Earlier than expected, more than expected, and bluer than expected

The Lauras doesn't come out until August (the 5th, the 11th, or the 8th, I'm not sure; the day keeps moving), but finished copies have already been printed and are being slung around to reviewers and non-reviewers alike. While The Shore  looked in proofs a lot like the finished copies, with this one the final books seem to have a bit of extra oomph to them. It could be that they're simply far more blue.  

Finished on the left, proof on the right.

The jacket pattern kinda reminds me of the way I draft nonfiction

I can't make pixels convey exactly how blue that flyleaf is. You'll just have to get a copy.

So, absolutely no more meddling: it is finished. I can't change it any more. And while I'm happy that it is - and still can't believe that I've managed to get not one, but two novels into print in the traditional fashion - I'm just a little nervous about how it will be received. More so, I think, than I was with The Shore. 

Guess all I can do is wait and see what people think. 

And maybe throw copies at naysayers. But I only have twelve copies, and I can think of nearly two dozen people who will want one. 

Thesis mode

My memory is odd. Looking back I get the impression that I've spent the last six months in general idleness, avoiding work and skiving off, and present Sara hates past Sara because of it, because when the looking back occurs present Sara is usually hustling to meet a deadline and wondering why past Sara didn't take care of it. But when I flip back through my diary it becomes clear why past Sara didn't take care of it, because past Sara generally does far more hustling of other types than present Sara remembers.

Today was the day that the first rough draft of my critical thesis was due to my supervisor. A week ago today was the day that I actually began working on it, because in the month before that I owed Henry 20,000 words, taught for FLY, presented at a conference, spent a week in the US doing research, judged a short fiction prize, had Annual Progress Review, and more or less kept up with the planning of my own conference. So the acrimony directed at past Sara was generally groundless, as very little skiving took place.

I've been writing up my research periodically as I've gone along, more as notes on what I've done than as actual readable material, and I've churned out a handful of self-contained pieces, so writing the first draft was less 'writing' than 'figuring out what part of what I already had was useable.' And if I'm bad at remembering what I've done, I'm even worse at remembering what I've already included in a document. So instead of approaching the thesis with any dignity, I took the arts-and-crafts line of attack:

Print it out, cut it up, sort like with like, put it back together, throw away the extra pieces. Just like Ikea.

I don't remember when I started doing it this way - no surprise there - but 'cut it all up and put it back together in an order that makes sense' seems to be the only way that I produce nonfiction that's in any way readable. 

It's kinda depressing to think that that's my critical output for the past three years. 

The risk, of course, is that all of the cutting and pasting and sorting out will take up so much time that the draft will be done in theory when the deadline pops up, but won't have made it back onto the computer. So far that hasn't happened, but I won't be surprised if one day I wind up hand-delivering a nine-foot sheet of taped-together paragraphs in lieu of a Word document. 

The whole was finished and sent at about ten this morning, with much fear and trembling because it's both far longer than my supervisor is expecting and far rougher than I was hoping it would be. Though, when I first sat down a week ago and looked at what I had, I hid under the desk and refused to come out because I thought I had absolutely nothing to show for the past three years, so I suppose I'm in a 100% better position than I expected to be.

FLY

Once a year, the professor who convened the first literature module I ever taught organises and executes the week-long Festival of Literature for Young People, or FLY for short. There are speakers and workshops and games for kids of school age, and it seems to be both madly popular and madly successful - my housemate remarked when he got in yesterday evening that half his school seems to have been signed out for it. 

UEA being what it is, a fair number of the volunteers are from its hallowed halls, including the workshop teachers. And since, when the email went around six months ago asking for teachers signing up seemed like a good idea, I got to field a batch of sixth formers this afternoon.

Under normal circumstances this wouldn't have born reporting, but I haven't taught in months now, and I haven't been in Norwich in weeks. Which means that I didn't get around to planning until yesterday, and even though the session wasn't until the afternoon I had to get to campus immediately post-breakfast so that I could wait in the medical centre for an hour to eventually be told that all seemed well and see you again in six months. So it should surprise no one but me that, immediately after being told I was healthy and skittering off to the postgrad cafe to drink coffee and wait for my teaching slot, I realised that not only had I forgotten to bring the bag full of random items necessary for my three favourite writing exercises, but that I'd completely forgotten that such a bag needed to be put together. 

I live a thirty minute walk away from the university. Today is one of those strange days you seem to get in England, where it's hot enough that one sweats, but too cool for shorts and sleevelessness; it's sunny enough to burn, but too cloudy to tan; every time I take my jacket off it starts raining, and every time I put it on it stops, and there's so much ambient moisture that all of that sweat just sits on your skin, like an oil slick. Also, I haven't been in Norwich for a while, so only my teaching clothes seem to be here. Teaching clothes bought intentionally for Norfolk winters, when I usually find myself teaching. Which explains why I wound up running from school to home and back again while dressed head to toe in black, and might begin to explain exactly how all-fire uncomfortable that was. 

An aside for foreign readers: aircon isn't a thing here the way it is in the U.S. 

The actual teaching went better than I hoped, at least. The students were a bit reticent, but they wrote, and they seemed to like the exercises I gave them. The best part for me, as always, was getting to hear some of the things they came up with; there wasn't a dud in the bunch.

Book Festivals

Now that the programmes have been finalised I can say that I'm going to be at both the West Cork Literary Festival and the Edinburgh Book Festival this summer!

On Saturday the 23rd of July I and Horatio Clare will be on Whiddy Island as part of the West Cork Literary Festival, reading from our work and most likely talking about our shared preoccupation with the ocean. As far as I can figure it should be the last event that I'll be doing about The Shore, because The Lauras comes out on August 11th, and it seems that most people are interested in the latest thing. I'll be glad to get a chance to read something different, though I'll miss being able to say 'thang' in public and still seemingly be taken seriously.

On Thursday the 25th of August I'll be in Edinburgh with Jenni Fagan, where we'll both be talking about our second books, The Sunlight Pilgrims and The Lauras. I recently met Jenni Fagan and was struck dumb by her awesomeness, and may have missed a deadline because I couldn't stop reading her first book, The Panopticon. So while I never feel comfortable insisting that I'm worth listening to, I feel more than qualified to say that she is.

Missing in Action

At the moment I'm sitting in a surprisingly large hotel room in Morristown, New Jersey, trying to find the will to sort my suitcase out, because it's going to have to be dropped tomorrow morning into the trunk of a car that's not mine and transported to the airport. I'm naturally going with it, but since nobody is going to be weighing me on arrival I require much less sorting.

Yesterday afternoon I presented the paper that I dropped off the face of the earth a few weeks ago to write as part of a panel dealing with censorship in public education. The room was surprisingly full, the questions were interesting and answerable, and I've finally met another human being who spends a horrifying amount of their time looking at textbooks. And since I presented on the first day, I got to spend today actually enjoying other peoples' papers instead of trembling in the corner with nerves. Even with the trembling, it was wonderful to finally feel as though I'm a part of an academic community; my research doesn't have much in common with that of the rest of my cohort, so a lot of the time I feel like the madwoman in the corner, pegging away at something that no one cares about. Meeting even one person who already gets it, let alone over a dozen, was worth the distance travelled.

This is probably the most productive trip I've ever been on: about two weeks ago I flew into DC and bribed my younger sister to drive me so that I could do a final round of location research for Belief, then spent nearly a week harassing relatives about their memories of their misspent youths, also for Belief, then dragged myself several states north for the conference. And now I get to skedaddle back to England to do something with it all before too much time passes and I can't understand my own notes.

And, of course, get back to helping organise a conference at UEA for this December. I'm sure the other plotters are just thrilled with my recent inability to answer email.

Marshalling the Forces

Besides writing a thesis, PGR students are supposed to hit a bunch of smaller benchmarks in order to be considered to have successfully finished the program. Some of them are stupid easy, such as earning the requisite professional development credits, which most of us do completely by accident and without plan. Others are more difficult, such as getting an article published in a reputable academic journal, which sounds like it's tough even for the professionals who have been playing this game for years. My personal Waterloo on that front has been finding a conference. I've run into ones on law, politics, education, childhood, but none of them had calls to which I could tailor my critical work enough to have a dream of getting accepted. The thing that made it even more frustrating was that they all seemed to be held places like Hawaii, Mauritius, Japan - the kinds of places that I'd kill to have a legitimate work reason to visit. 

So imagine how ecstatic I was when I finally found a conference for which my work was suited. And imagine how much more ecstatic I was when they actually accepted my paper proposal. 

So, what's the catch?

It's in New Jersey.

Not even old Jersey, but New Jersey, where approximately 80% of my relatives live, where I've been dragged for weddings and christenings since before I was old enough to realise that even the people who live there aren't exactly crazy about the place. No offence to anyone, but I hate New Jersey. I can practically hear the gods laughing. 

Now that I have a place to give a paper, I actually have to write it. They only allow presenters twenty minutes apiece, so it isn't going to be that long, and it is delivered verbally, so the usual rhetorical stylings and five-dollar language goes out the window in favour of clarity and simplicity. You'd think that would make it all easier. For some reason, the mere idea of getting started is terrifying me. Maybe my Everest of secondary sources has something to do with it.

Yes, that is a blackbird. Yes, he is hanging upside down. I don't know why, ask him. 

As things go, the timing is really fantastic. Annual Review has just been, and the major decision made therein was that I'd hand over a full draft of the critical thesis in September. Which means that I need to sequester myself over the summer and write it. And what better way to get into the groove of writing a thesis than by writing a smaller, simpler, more straightforward portion of one of its main arguments? The secondary sources (pictured above; probably overkill) have been gathered, the calendar has been cleared, the outlines have been drawn up. There is absolutely nothing stopping me from hammering out both conference paper and critical thesis.

It probably means a lot that instead of actually beginning the paper, I pulled up a web browser and wrote a blog post. 

Somebody send reinforcements.

Slouching towards the finish line

This weekend, by the power of coffee, the page proofs were sent back to Random House all squiggled up with little blue pen-marks. The changes I made were extensive enough that I'm now a bit nervous about the fact that anyone is going to see the bound proofs, which consist of the pre-final edit text. Which means I should either learn to lighten up a little or push myself to be more ruthless with the things that I know I need to change but don't have the will to change yet when it comes to the earlier revisions. The final edit mostly consisted of metaphorically bouncing every word against the table to hear whether it rang true, and messing with the ones that thudded, so I'm less of a basket case than I was on the day I finished the structural revision and realised that I was essentially done writing the novel. 

And while I've been tweaking the insides, other people have been tweaking the outsides:

There should be a little box of bound proofs turning up on my doorstep any day now...

And now that that's mostly done and dusted, there's nothing keeping me from locking myself in my flat in Norwich and writing up my critical thesis.

Oh, dear...

Page proofs and covers

Last night Penguin books held a little social gathering (as they seem to frequently do) for people who either write about books or select the books that go into shops. It wasn't until I found the private club where the party was being held that I remembered that I haven't really left the house since December and have therefor completely forgotten how to act at these things. And I'm starting to suspect that final edits isn't a good stage during which to go out and be charming about books, because it seems that a project is only truly done when I've completely given up on it. The whole reason I get invited along is to be charming about books in the general direction of the people who can influence how many people read them; the reason I say yes is that it's a rare chance to meet writers who aren't products of Norwich. This time I was especially lucky in that I got to gush to Carys Bray over how much I loved A Song for Issy Bradley and The Museum of You, and got to meet Jenni Fagan well in advance of doing Edinburgh Festival with her later this year.

Jason also happened to be there, and in what felt both old-fasioned but appropriate to the fact that we were drinking wine in a private members' club in Soho, he gave me this:

Page Proofs! It should surprise no one that I have pens reserved specifically for the job of marking these up.

This should be the last batch of corrections, which makes me a little anxious because the revision process has been too quick this time for me to second-guess myself on anything. But I've three times regretted writing the book at all, which means that it's very close to being finished.

Over the course of the night it came out that I'm practically the only person who hasn't gotten to see the cover yet, because they haven't made up their minds and they don't want me to fall in love with a cover that gets binned. But it's only a week until the bound proof comes out, so Jason was easily convinced to hand them over:


 

Most of them are out of the running, but I like seeing all of the iterations. They look nothing like what I imagined they would, but they all fit the book very well.

Now all I have to do is learn to pronounce the title clearly enough so that people know what on earth I'm saying.

Invasion

So my parents have come to visit. Their only other trip to England was for the wedding a year an a half ago, so this is the first time they're experiencing the place as itself, rather than the ground zero of a major life decision. And this is the first time I've experienced them out of their native habitat without being completely preoccupied with the logistics of herding relatives.

I'd forgotten all of the cultural differences between here and Virginia; they all come rushing back every time I watch my father amble up to someone - usually a barista - and begin what sounds like an in-depth conversation about the meaning of life as a preamble to ordering coffee. We've gone into nearly every grocery store in Reading and Norwich for the purpose of reading all the labels and then buying the most alien items - Saturday it was pate, steak-flavoured crisps, millionaire shortbread, and a single pork pie. My father zipped into the Poundland and bought a case of Coleman's mustard while my back was turned. It took the better part of an afternoon to explain to my mother why UEA is a brutalist monstrosity rather than the Oxbridge-esque Gothic confection that she and everyone back home has apparently been imagining. They both seem to be enjoying everything we're seeing, but what they really want to do is find the key to our garden shed and spend the week getting the back yard in order, with an option on more steak crisps.

But in between all of that the copyeditor's queries have been dealt with, tuition has been paid, work has been done, and it would appear that the only people who have noticed I'm not actually working are the two compatriots with whom I'm supposed to be organising a conference for December.

Oh, my sister's here too. But this is her third trip over and she's the only person on the planet who does exactly what I ask her to do the first time I ask, so it's easy to forget she's there because she doesn't require watching, just intermittent feeding, like a pet snake.

And the end comes in sight

It's a little strange to think that, if all goes well, I'll have managed to earn two postgraduate degrees in the time it took me to knock out my undergraduate degree. And it suddenly looks, for the first time in a long time, as if all will go well.

 Last summer Rachel set me the task of writing a journal article that could theoretically be published somewhere peer-reviewed and respectable. My deadline to send it out was December, so of course it didn't get sent until mid-March. In the eight months that I'd spent working on it I'd done very little research for my critical thesis and no writing, so when I went to see Rachel last week to talk about said thesis I was feeling just a bit despondent, which was only lifted slightly when I gave her the litany of what I've done since I saw her last December: my research is nearly finished, the novel is nearly finished, the extraneous training and engagement tasks the school deems mandatory are nearly finished, and I'm participating in organising a conference. But I hadn't done anything towards my thesis in over six months, and I couldn't see being able to submit until January 2017, at the earliest.

Her response to that was to bring out a copy of the article I'd written and point to all the places I could bolt on sections addressing the rest of my research, essentially making it the stem of my thesis. I asked if that wasn't considered cheating. Apparently, using something one's written for another purpose is not only allowed, but recommended. So I left her office with joy in my heart and a plan for the summer: if all goes well I should be able to submit on the first of October, which is three years and a day from the day I began and the absolute first day that I'm allowed to submit, and then spend the autumn term teaching and going to training sessions in preparation for the day that I've vivad and passed and need to go forth and look for a job.

It's been rocky, but it's been fun. And though I'm already feeling separation anxiety over leaving the womb of the university in my capacity as student, I've got to admit that three years is perfect. If I had to keep this up for seven or more, I might just hurt someone. 

From pillar to post

The deadline to send a more-or-less final version of The Lauras back to everyone who had sent me notes so that the copyeditor can get started on it and a proof can be made was this morning. Which means that I spent  Sunday sat on the living room sofa making final tweaks and then forcing Dave to read them and tell me whether they made logical sense before sending the final copy out to all and sundry and wandering off to watch Trainspotting in a state of post-revision limpness. Of course, everyone's firewall ate my email, which led to distressed pre-coffee phone calls and several moments of panic. But now the draft is finally in the hands of all who need it, and I can go back to everything that's been neglected in the past two weeks.

It's technically Easter holiday for the university but, as I keep telling my family, that means pretty much diddly for postgrads, so a lot of this edit was done on the train back and forth to Norwich and in between thesis and conference planning meetings. And if that didn't complicate the process enough, my spellcheck decided to be Dutch the day I started work.

Those are the suggested corrections for the word 'if.' Never have I so questioned my ability to spell.

So it's a good thing that there's going to be a copyeditor looking at the book before anyone else does, because not only am I very inconsistent when it comes to language usage, but I really, really, really cannot spell. And apparently my computer can't either at the moment. 

It's kinda sad that I'm actually excited to go off and read Foucault.

And so it goes...

I'm just a little bit proud of the fact that I got through a first pass of The Lauras in 36 hours, which means that the resulting draft is shorter by about 17,000 words (or one word in six) and the notes that Jason sent me now look like this:

 I'm trying to be organised, Mom, I swear! 

Since the first pass was mainly about reducing the size of the book like a contestant on a medically questionable reality TV show, any note that couldn't be dealt with by making a straightforward cut got marked with a tab. And since I'm eternally trying to overcome my entropic nature, they're colour coded: green-yellow is for notes that need a second look, pink for timeline issues, blue for differences of opinion, and orange for those rare moments where I have no idea what the note is asking me to do.

There aren't that many tabs, all things considered, but cutting that much will have left narrative holes that need to be puttied in. I've also got notes from Lucy that I'm hoping will cover anything that my editor missed.

Juuuust a little more intimidating than all the coloured tabs.

And while I'm at it, there's my own self to satisfy. During the cutting portion I kept running across sentences that needed to be tightened up, which means that I'm probably far enough away from the thrill of having written the thing to be able to see it clearly. Which means it's time to go through and make sure that every single word is the exact perfect word and ruthlessly remove any that aren't.

So, with all that to do and limited time to do it in, it makes perfect sense that the moment I finished the first pass was the moment that my brain decided it was vacation time, as certain brains are wont to do. What have I been doing since I finished the first past? God alone knows, because I sure don't. When will my brain come back and start behaving? With any luck, the moment I click publish and go make another cup of coffee. But that's assuming I don't run into any half-read books on the way back.

Notes!

It turns out that all of my inbox watching was in vain, because Jason's notes arrived in the form of a fat package through the post.

It weighs about as much as the two hardcovers he sent with it...

The manuscript is 300-odd pages long and just a little bit intimidating; I've given it a flip-through and several pages are crossed out entirely. But still, frightening notes are better than no notes, and I've been impatient to get back to working on it. With any luck there will be proofs to fling around by the time the London Book Fair arrives. I've heard rumours of cover art being ready to ogle in a week or so, though all things considered I'm not sure that said rumours aren't serving as the proverbial carrot: never to be held in the hand, much less made into cake.

Of course I can get through that in two weeks.


Famous last words.

Re-imagined fairy tales

When I was doing the MA I had heaps of time to both write and submit short stories to anywhere that would take them. So naturally I wrote and submitted stories like they were going out of style, and then promptly forgot that I'd sent out to people because steroid psychosis tends to do that to a person. The up side of all the forgetting is that stuff is popping up now like inky little crocuses. I can't go through my files without finding something I don't remember writing, and every now and again I hear from people who I don't remember submitting to.

Which is why I'm as surprised as anyone that a short story of mine has been published in an anthology of darkly re-imagined fairy tales: 

Gotta admit, I adore the cover. 

Grimm and Grimmer, Volume 4 is free to Kindle subscribers and pretty dang cheap (less than a fiver) for everyone else. Check it out. 

The Kitschies

Cuddly tentacles were given out on Monday night, in the downstairs of a pub in London. Like the downstairs of a lot of pubs, this one had a pretty low ceiling, which I only noticed when the actual prize-giving began and nearly all the men who took the microphone had to crouch to avoid braining themselves. My memory of the evening is fuzzy - much like the tentacles - probably because I was preoccupied by the fact that MARGARET ATWOOD WAS THERE and MARGARET ATWOOD WAS WEARING A TENTACLE MONSTER.

Photo borrowed from the kitschie's blog with hopes they won't mind. 

Dave kept trying to make me go and say hello to her - it was a small enough event that that wouldn't have been totally weird - and I kept threatening to deck him if he didn't stop, because I'm of the theory that one should never meet one's heroes unless expressly sought out by them, because there lies the path to madness and restraining orders. I was amused to find out that her agent, who was also there and wearing tentacles, was the agent that made my MA year cry in despair many moons ago. Small world, ain't it?

Only tangentially related: I keep hearing that writers never really get famous because people can't pick them out on the street, and I wonder if it's a symptom of my work, of being connected to UEA, or of having an obsessive personality that I do recognise a lot of the well-respected writers on sight, even ones who I don't personally read and have never actually met. I guess it makes it a little less weird that the ones who I recognise immediately, from the back, and across a crowded room (Ali Smith, Helen Dunmore, Kate Mosse... ok, Margaret Atwood) are all people I've met in person. 

All of the books (and video games) on the shortlists sound amazing. Like most book events, the room was decorated with copies from the shortlist, and I managed to make off with a few, but all of them are going onto my to-read list. And books that more closely fit the criteria of progressive and speculative are going onto my to-write list. 

There must have been something either in the air or the water. About halfway through the evening Dave pulled on my sleeve and said, "Golden Ratio." Then, on the eight-minute tube ride to Liverpool Street Station we worked up the outline of an entire speculative novel from that one concept, wrote it down, and moved on to an epic fantasy blending sci-fi and dragons before having to get off. And now it looks like both of us wish we could temporarily abandon responsibility to go write, which is pretty normal for me but less so for Dave. So if I happen to vanish in the near future, it might have something to do with spirals. 

(Not) Procrastinating

I've admitted to myself that continuously refreshing my inbox isn't going to make Jason's notes come any faster, and that hiding under my bed isn't going to make the other work that I should have already done go away, so I've finally settled in to try and do my American taxes. Which are far more confusing than my English taxes, because the tax forms all assume that you're earning in USD, living in the States, and getting all these forms along with your income that don't seem to exist in Britain. Take multiple currencies, add tax years that cover different date ranges, multiply by the number of different income streams, and it will make perfect sense why I've been doing literally anything other than dealing with it.

When I got to be a teenager and started earning money, my parents told me that I shouldn't worry about taxes: my dad would do them until I got married, then my husband would do them until one of us kicked it, and that was the way the world worked. Then when I got to my twenties and had to juggle paying for grad school with a dozen sources of income in four currencies without screwing up enough to land in jail my mom told me to stop stressing about it, my financial situation couldn't possibly be as topsy-turvey as I insisted it was. Now I have an accountant because no one, related by blood or marriage, is willing to touch my taxes without fiscal encouragement, and it's the most I can manage to gather together the documentation; I'd rather go to jail for evasion than file myself.

Come to think of it, my family has a pretty consistent track record for giving me a hard time for worrying about things that they say either won't happen or shouldn't worry me, only for the exact thing I've gotten worked up about to turn out to be exactly as much of an issue as I initially thought it would be. Sometimes it takes weeks, sometimes years, but it seems to always happen - with the exception of my paralysing fear that I'd not get into university.

So I was riffling through my filing cabinet trying to find the documents for the accountant and pulling out writery things for the Archive - and being unprecedentedly proud of myself for not only managing to hang onto all of my payment advice slips from last year, but having them all in the same file AND in the house where the tax doing needs to happen - when I found a bunch of writing from the end of the MA that I'd totally forgotten about. And one of the little bits was a sort of note-to-self in defence of the first person. And since all that sort of thing is going to the Archive I figured it made sense to copy it out here (which is actually why I sat down to write this post in the first place, as opposed to whining about taxes) because it's a question I still haven't heard satisfactorily answered.

A while back I wrote a horror story in which the narrator gets turned into a zombie at the end, and the editor of the anthology it was going in objected to the use of the first person on the grounds that, if the character gets turned into a zombie, how are they narrating the story? Which made me think about the whole idea of first person narrators. Epistolary novels have more or less fallen by the wayside, so in a lot of cases, while a first-person narrator is essentially telling the reader the story, exactly how that is occurring isn't made clear, even if it is technically plausible. In most cases the narrator stays alive to the end, so I suppose it could be argued that they wrote the whole thing down after the fact. Except we all accept that fiction is a construct - the first person narrator isn't the one who has written the story. And so I object to the idea that the question 'how is this person telling us this story?' has to have a logical answer.

What makes less sense? That there's some disembodied consciousness following a bunch of characters around who then records it all once they've offed each other so that an external party can enjoy the account, or that the reader is a parasite in the character's mind and therefore experiencing it all as it happens. Why can't the narrator die at the end? What demands the greater suspension of disbelief: that the narrator dies and yet the narration follows them through death, or the fact that this takes place in a world where black magic is possible and girls can turn their older sisters into zombies?

There aren't many questions that irk me more than 'how is this narration possible?' It's possible because we as a species have developed written language and an appreciation for fiction. It's possible because the narrative hasn't actually been written by the narrator. It exists, therefor it's possible.

OED, how I love thee

It's been nearly three years since I started writing Belief, the novel that's going to form the majority of my dissertation and which I'm not supposed to talk about until The Lauras has been published. Its development has been painful: the writing has been slow, the revising has been slow, the research has been impossible, and every time I dragged a chunk of it to Henry's office his response has been some iteration of, "Nope. Try again."

Until last week, when I showed him the seventh version of the first chapter, and he said, "This is it. Now make the other 140,000 words just like it. And add some more period detail."

So today I got to sit down with the printout that he scribbled on to try and fit in a little more period detail. I've been putting off adding more period detail for a while, because detail for a period that people who are still living can remember is an utter pain in the rump and other parts of the anatomy.

In the first chapter there's a single sentence about mother-daughter shopping trips. Practically a throwaway line. Except these shopping trips are supposed to take place in New York in 1963. I'm eternally grateful to the people who keep retro, vintage, mid-century and etc. blogs, because otherwise that one line would have taken me far longer than the three hours I spent on it. And I'm still nervous that someone my aunt's age is going to read it and take me to task over getting makeup fashions wrong.

The fun side of 'period' writing (I can see my mother now, having a fit because I called the decade of her youth 'period') is that I got to spend the entire day farting around on the internet and emailing relatives and can still call it work. Things I got to look up today: Jello salads, Bloomingdales, polyester, makeup, stockings, dresses, retro fashion in general, shag rugs, sunken living rooms, kitchen appliances, cocktail parties, first communion dresses, lunch counters, romance novels, movie heartthrobs, teen movies, drive-in movies, girl's athletics, field hockey, beach party films, 1969 current events, rocks glasses, the history of the words 'tart,' 'chick,' and 'queer,' and female sexual awakening because I'm 99% sure that my own was far from representative.

The best part of all of that was my discovery of the OED's historical thesaurus. How it works is this: you enter a word (in my case, 'tart') and it gives you a list of synonyms in the order in which they came into recorded usage, complete with a date of first recorded usage. So now I know that 'tart' came into use with the meaning 'woman of questionable virtue' in 1864, 'virago' circa 1000, 'carline' in 1375, 'minikin' in 1540, 'maness' in 1594, and 'lost rib' in 1647, and that there is a slew of other terms for woman with a range of connotations that really should come back into use because those commonly used now just lack something.

Tentacles and paperback reviews

So I found out this afternoon that The Shore has been shortlisted for the Golden Tentacle, the category of The Kitschies ("The prize for progressive, intelligent, and entertaining literature with a speculative element") reserved for debut fiction. The fact that The Shore is being considered spec fic makes me clam-in-mud happy - it also makes me really want to go off and write some properly hardcore speculative fiction, but I've promised to finish the current projects before I start anything else. There are five books on the shortlist, and I'm crossing my fingers that I get a chance to get my dirty mitts on the other four. Winners are announced on the 7th of March, which isn't very long to wait at all. And there aren't any poets on the shortlist, so I've got a tiny measure of hope this time.

And while I'm broadcasting news, an author Q&A has gone up on the review site run by Deborah Kalb for anyone who has questions but won't get a chance to ask them. And the Sunday Times ran a review for the paperback edition that was wonderfully positive and used the term 'anti-pastoral.' I'm not sure if I should get that tattooed somewhere or just use it as my work credo - next should come an anti-road novel, then an anti-family drama, and one day maybe an anti-romance if I work really hard.

Usually I dread looking at my email inbox, and doubly dread needing to respond to anything, but after having all of that come in today I'm almost feeling downright fond of the monstrosity...

Flight and The Fiddlehead

About a decade ago, when I first found out that the literary magazines I nicked from the library and read samples from online accepted submissions from pretty much anyone, I made a hit list of the magazines where I most desperately wanted to be published one day. In the top three was The Fiddlehead, Canada's longest living journal. Given its reputation I figured I had not a chance but continued submitting anyway, since regular rejection letters are like strength training for the soul.

So I am pretty well ecstatic to say that "Flight," one of the pieces that was cut from the final edit of The Shore, appears in the Winter 2016 issue.

This issue, in fact.

"Flight" was one of my favourite stories. It was probably the most difficult to write and definitely took the most research - it involves rockets, NASA, and the 1950s - but since it's about an outsider coming to the Shore for the first time, and since the book was more than a little over length until the bitter end, it fell prey to the red pen. The book mostly focuses on one family, and this was one of the few pieces that could be taken out without disturbing the threads that connected all the rest.

But that doesn't matter now, because rather than languishing in a desk drawer the story is snugged up in an issue of a magazine in which I thought I'd never be good enough to have a place. And just in case the prospect of getting another nibble of the islands and the ponies isn't enough to tempt you over to The Fiddlehead's website for a copy of the issue, here's a glance at the opening:

It's probably time to invest in a new camera...

Paperback

I poke my nose above the drift of books and papers to say that, after having moved around quite a bit, the UK release date for the paperback edition of The Shore is February 25th! Though they lack the bludgeoning capabilities of hardback, I've always had a soft spot for softcover books - they seem more tactile, and they tend to be easier to lug around. A hardback belongs on the shelf where it can look impressive, a paperback belongs in the hand. And I always feel like I've committed a crime when my hardcover books get mussed, while the softcovers need the mussing to feel broken in and comfortable.

The US release date shouldn't be far behind, but I'm blowed if I can figure out when it is. My guess is that it will also move around a bit and then leap out when no one suspects - as so much in publishing seems to do.

On the topic of things leaping out unexpected: I've gotten back into the horrible habit of inbox watching, because any minute now either or both of my editors will send through their final stack of notes for The Lauras. Until that happens I'm stuck plodding responsibly on with postgraduate work, which wouldn't be that bad except I know that the moment that I start enjoying it the edits will come and I'll have to abandon censorship for the sake of finishing the book on time. I'm a bit tempted to get some chalk and the Harry Potter books and see if I can bastardise a spell into summoning edits in my kitchen - I was never allowed to read Harry Potter because it apparently taught you how to do magic, but given the time crunch I'm pretty sure a little magic would be more than justified.