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.