Notes in no specific order

1) Following graduation there is generally a period of internal disturbance during which the subject mopes, wonders what they've done with the last three (five, seven, twelve) years of their life, wonders what the point of life is at all, and generally does nothing useful. The length of this mope generally correlates to how pressing it is that they find a job. If they already have a job, the mope may continue indefinitely. If they are self-employed, the mope may be synchronous with the bare minimum of work.

B) If writing is a burrow (to borrow Margaret Atwood's description) then revision is an oubliette. A burrow can imaginably be made to be comfortable and homey; the point of an oubliette is to be as unpleasant as it is impossible to get out of. In Beatrix Potter guests are frequently hosted to tea in burrows. The nicest thing that's ever happened in an oubliette, as far as I know, is Jennifer Connelly getting out of one.

III) 50% of revision is trying to move plot points which are contingent on historical events without causing an anachronism. Another 50% is being cranky about it. 

Still another 50% is coming to hate the work enough that you're willing to delete anything, because that's the state that is required by an effective revision. 

Դ) Every book I've read and class I've been in (and taught) has emphasised the fact that the worst thing a body can do to a piece of writing is start polishing up the sentences too early; work has to stay in a semi-fluid state, where everything is up for debate, until there's a clear idea of what final shape it will settle into. Unfortunately, bringing an extract to a supervisor once a month meant that everything I've written since 2013 had to be pretty immediately polished up. Which means that I have to go back and crack the gloss so that parts can be moved around and a working shape can be made. 

At least I've learned one way not to write a novel, and so will be saved ever using it again.

⠑) Revision is finally less depressing than keeping abreast of world events, and this book is pretty grim in places.

䷇) The fact checking list includes: Brown v. Board of Education, 1980s moral panics, Eloquentia Perfecta, Eucharistic Discipline, Women's Rights, the Pro-Life Movement, Georgetown University's student newspaper, Watergate, the oil embargo, and the etymology of the word 'dork'. 

...---...) It could be worse. I could be doing my taxes.

American Publication Day (was yesterday)!

Yesterday, The Lauras was released in the United States. It looks like this:

If I had favourite covers, this would probably be it.

Normally, publication day makes me anxious. Abnormally, my brother and his wife are visiting, and by the time we got to the part of yesterday by which I had finally woken up and was able to form coherent thoughts we'd already begun mixing drinks and talking about existential terror and our absent siblings' bad life decisions, so I never quite got around to remembering until the time for anxiety had passed. It was both celebratory (despite my forgetting there was something to celebrate) and less reminiscent of than a reprise of how we spent high school.

Luckily, other people remembered what day it was, and other people have been reading the book in the lead up. Kirkus and The New York Journal of Books both reviewed it ahead of time, and Bookriot has included it in the month's must-read new releases. There are other reviews in other places, and probably many that I've forgotten about or just missed. To my great joy, most of the reviewers seem to have 'got' Alex, and that was the biggest thing I'd crossed my fingers for. With any luck, the rest of the American reading public will also.

Last minute hustle

At the end of my viva I was told to sit tight until official notice came through telling me what to do next, and since the uni website said that all I had to do to graduate this summer was make the July 7th pass list, I figured sitting tight was what I'd do. Except sitting tight goes against my nature, and since I happened to be up in Norwich a few weeks ago I figured it wouldn't hurt to drop by the postgrad office and ask them when they thought my marching orders would be appearing. And it was a good thing I did, because the nice lady in the office told me that the deadline for submitting the final copy was actually the 12th of June, or two working days and a weekend from right then, but they were processing forms as fast as they could and with any luck I'd have the letter telling me what to do in time to actually do something about it.

The rub in all that lay in the fact that, while my examiners had told me exactly what changes they wanted me to make to the thesis - delete two sentences, reword a third sentence, and clean up the typos - they hadn't told me definitively if those were gentleman's agreement type corrections, or if they'd be putting them in the official writeup. The difference being that in the first instance I could go ahead and turn in the draft that I'd already corrected, while in the second instance someone would have to sign off on the fact that I'd done the corrections, adding a week or two to the process and putting me well past the hand-in date.

I hate gambling, but in the final analysis it seemed smarter to bet on the letter saying 'pass with no corrections.' At which point I found that the official binder of UEA theses needs a five-day run-up at this time of year. Which meant that I had to find someone else who could bind it overnight and get it to me in time for me to get it to the University before the deadline, still assuming that in all this the paperwork would be processed and I'd be allowed to submit it. Which meant that, rather than handing a pdf of the thesis to someone who knew how UEA likes theirs bound, I got to find someone in Leeds who could do it in a hurry, then weed through several versions of the University regulations trying to figure out exactly in which direction they wanted the spine lettering printed.

Digression: why is it that every time I've had to submit something that adheres to strict specifications - at university, to the border agency, to the taxman - those specifications are so imprecisely worded that, with the best will in the world, I always send in my work with no clue as to whether it actually meets the guidelines? The uni guidelines stated that the bound copy had to have the name of the degree for which it was submitted on the cover, but didn't say whether that meant 'PhD,' 'Doctor of Philosophy,' or 'Doctor of Philosophy in Creative and Critical Writing;' there were points in the documents where that phrase referred to all three terms.

On Friday the 9th I received the bound thesis: it was as black as my mood and the perfect density for bludgeoning. Much later on Friday (about six hours too late to phone up a printer if I'd waited for the official go-ahead) I received the letter that told me that I had passed without corrections, and all I had to do was turn in the bound copy that I fortuitously had. On Sunday  I went trudging back up to Norwich, because I've had the trains cancelled on me too often to trust them to be running on a day when I absolutely had to make it through. And on Monday I trudged from where I was staying in town to the Elizabeth Fry building to hand the damn thing over. At which point I found that the office where I was supposed to submit the thing was closed and locked for a school holiday.

Because of course the office is closed on the deadline that determines whether a person makes this year's graduation.

The panicking only lasted as long as it took me to find the staff member chilling in a meeting room two floors down on the off chance that someone wanted to bring in a thesis that day. Since she didn't pull out callipers to check the formatting I figured that any minor misreadings of the guidelines would be allowed to squeak by. But she also didn't give me a receipt, or any guarantee that someone else wouldn't catch an error and I'd have to do it over again. So it wasn't until I got another letter, the one that says, "the following candidate has satisfied the examiners for the award of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy" with my name after it, that I stopped worrying.

So it looks like I'm really finished this time. And it looks like I'll be graduating next month.

And, for the life of me, I don't know how to feel about either of those things.

It is finished

Last Thursday was my viva. About ten days before last Thursday I wound up in A&E at four in the morning where a very nice doctor told me that my stomach was staging a coup and I should give up caffeine and stress, which is exactly what a person with a crippling caffeine addiction wants to hear ten days before the meeting that passes judgement on the previous four years of their life. Real life can be the biggest hack.

Part of the stress came from having two people whose work I immensely enjoy and respect as examiners. It's usually a mistake to meet your heroes, but passing up the chance to have them read my work just because I was afraid they would prove mortal seemed silly, or at least it did last summer when I was filling in the paperwork. On the train up to Norwich I was pretty certain that they'd tell me to rewrite the entire thing - and on some level I wished that they would tell me to rewrite the entire thing, as coming back to it after three months made all the flaws painfully clear. 

I may have spent the hour before the actual viva sitting in a remote corner of the university campus quietly singing rounds, because singing is the best way to keep yourself from hyperventilating, keeling over, and missing whatever it is that's got you nervous. Or so I've been told.

When I turned up at the internal examiner's office door on Thursday afternoon they seemed positively friendly. 

And then they told me that I'd passed.

And then they told me that, more than finding the thing adequate, they'd actually enjoyed it.

And then it turned into a really interesting conversation about free speech and culture and religion and the limits of legal action and the capacity of fiction to address those things that can't be quantified but which nevertheless influence the tide of history. Philosophy and theory didn't even get a look-in, and no one asked about the books that I hadn't read. 

They didn't really give me corrections - two sentences to delete and some stray typos to correct - so I suppose the next thing to do is get the final, bound version to the university with all of its accompanying paperwork in time to be included on the next pass list, so I can graduate this summer with all of the people I know and like. And I suppose I should start looking for academic posts of a shape that I could fit myself to. And I should probably start thinking about writing another novel. And  now that the thesis is done it needs to be broken down into journal articles, or else built up into a monograph, so it can do someone else some good. And maybe one of these days I'll actually unpack.

But right now my brain is mush, and I've forgotten how to talk. So I'll probably work on peace negotiations with my stomach, and leave everything else 'til next week.

Staring down the viva

On Monday Belief finally got to the point that someone else could read it without me immediately dying of shame. So I sent it off to Lucy, only six months later than I originally intended to. It isn't a short book, and it certainly isn't a tidy book just yet, so there's no point eating my fingernails while watching my inbox for guidance on how to make it a tidy book. Which means there's nothing keeping me from prepping for my viva. And since I originally created this blog as a record of my stumblings through higher education, the whole thing would lack symmetry if I didn't record how I'm going to be doing that.

First off, 'viva' is short for 'viva voce,' which in this context is taken to mean 'defending with the living voice.' In the English system the doctoral candidate is usually orally examined on the thesis, and the examination is a factor in whether the candidate passes. In the case of UEA, the examination is performed by one member of the university, and one member from an external university, whose work is related to the subject of the thesis. I've been more than a little annoyed with my fellow Americans in the past couple of months because they can't seem to wrap their minds around this; they think the whole thing is a formality and the hard work was over when I handed in.

As far as prepping for the viva is concerned, the first thing I did was panic, because that's seemingly the first thing everyone does, and because everyone I asked who had already done it told me that the best prep was to pray, bargain, cry, and eat chocolate, which is realistic but not very helpful. The second thing I did was google around to see how people I don't know prepped for theirs, which was marginally more helpful.

The advice I found broke down into two basic categories: know your opponent, and know yourself. A bunch of them are common sense, but when you're panicking even common sense seems like black magic.

1) Hunt up the university's Examiner Report forms, and their guidelines for examiners. They'll outline exactly what constitutes a pass, a pass with corrections, a rewrite, a fail, and any other outcomes the school considers possible. That will let you skew your responses to questions so that they demonstrate your achievement of the benchmarks.

2) Find and read the examiners' work. Get a sense of what they are preoccupied with, what their views might be on your material, and how they build your arguments. In my case, discover that the external has written critical essays on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and immediately fangirl to hell and back.

3) Find out what's been published in your field since you stopped gathering material. In the same vein, make a list of what you left out of the thesis, or the literature review, and be able to defend why.

4) Put together a list of sample questions that might be asked, and start thinking about how you might answer them. There are scads of sample questions out there, all you need to do is Google. Which sounds dirty, out of context.

5) Review the actual thesis. Read the whole thing again. Put in flags to mark where chapter and section breaks are so you don't have to shuffle too much finding them. Highlight important quotes. Make a list of typos as you go through so that you can get right on to correcting them after the viva is over, and so you can strategically bring it out if typos come up in the meeting to let the examiners know that you're on top of them. Write a one-page summary of each chapter of the thesis. Look up how to pronounce words that you're not sure of, or the names of authors whose work you reference.

6) Consider what you're willing to defend to the death, and what's up for compromise. This is probably more dependant on what discipline you're in, and how subjective the work is.

7) Write down the questions that you want to ask the examiners, so you don't forget them on the day.

8) Figure out the practical concerns, such as how you're going to get there on the day.

And that seems to be all that one can realistically do. So I'm going to go off and do it.

And I'm going to eat chocolate while I'm doing it.

Notes from limbo

It's about two months until my viva, and I seem to be recovering some of the brain cells that were sacrificed to finish writing the thesis. I've also started recovering the draft of Belief that I lost, or rather piecing together a new draft from what I've still got, and since a good chunk of that is in the thesis I've had more than one horrible moment of realising that what I've handed in contains some Glaring Mistakes.

One of the major contributors to the returning brain cells is the three weeks spent in Australia over last month, first for Adelaide Writers' Week and then for some independent exploring, because spending 35 hours travelling only to turn around and come home when the work is finished is really hard to contemplate when you don't have anything seriously pressing to come home to, and because it took me most of our time in Adelaide to get over the trauma of that much time spent in a metal tube in the forcible company of people.

Writers' Week was amazing on several levels: the organisers were both inhumanly organised and superhumanly lovely, the speakers were the stuff of fantasy, and the audience members were genuinely lovely, both during the events and in casual conversation afterwards. Dave and I had the privilege of turning up before it all began and sticking around until it all ended, and we spent an agonised morning trying to figure out how many events we could afford to go to before we were told that they were all free, at which point we decided to go to all of them. And now my stack of books to read has grown exponentially, and my list of people that I'd quite like to have a drink with if ever they're in the area has expanded proportionately.

And a little bit of happy news: The Lauras has been shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature's Encore Award. 

Dazed and confused

In the last few days of working on the thesis I went looking through my computer for the master copy of Belief so that I could check a timeline issue, and made the unpleasant discovery that the master copy, thanks to a hiccough in my operating system, no longer existed. Since it was the last few days of working on the thesis I screamed for a little bit and went back to working on the thesis, but after the thesis was done I went around to the computer-type people I know to confirm that, yes, the file had been eaten and, while I still had sections of the novel littering my hard drive that could be pulled together to make up what I'd lost, minus a round or two of revision, there was no way of recovering the actual document that had been lost.

Considering this is the fourth time that such a thing has happened with this novel alone it should no longer surprise anyone that I draft on paper. I'm not sure if this happens to be an especially ill-fated novel, or if I'm having worse luck than usual with electronics. Either way, it's not as much of a total disaster as it could be. Depending on the time of day it's slightly less annoying than the fact that, since moving, I can find none of my socks or sweaters. Though that could be due to still being stuck in the brain-fog that seemed to descend the moment I handed in, which has made everything from spelling to tying my shoes pretty well impossible. The one thing that I haven't been too foggy to do is transcribe, so the moment that I could look at the first draft without feeling sick I started transcribing it. And this afternoon I finished it. Maybe tomorrow my head will be clear enough to start putting what I have in order again.

Hand in

I've fallen down the rabbit hole of final round editing. Everything that could possibly considered a verifiable fact has been double-checked. Every word that might possibly need to be capitalised has been looked up. The spelling of words that I could spell when I was seven (that's a lie, I've never been able to spell) has been checked in multiple dictionaries. All the little things that I was going to take care of later have finally been taken care of. It's been printed, and then bits of it were re-printed because I discovered that I'd leaned on a corner of the keyboard between copies and my Contents page had sprung a rash that looked like QQQ~Q```q~~Q`. It was bound with minor trepidation on the part of myself and the help-desk librarian, because it required the biggest spine they had and didn't quite fit into the binding machine without being forced. And then it was left on the corner of my desk for a day while I chased my supervisor for signatures, because he needs to attest to the fact that it's my work and isn't in today.

And now it looks like this:

Chapstick for scale, because my owls are all packed.

One copy is for me to us for reference during the viva, the other two are going to be taken down to the PGR office in a few hours, I'm going to sign forms attesting all manner of things including the fact that it is my own work, and then it will be both practically and officially out of my hands. 

I'm not sure how I feel about this, though it is a verifiable fact that I haven't been able to sleep this week. It's also a verifiable fact that I've been letting a million things slip since about September that will now need to be aggressively gotten after, so I won't really have the time to dwell on anything. 

Oh, and I don't think I ever mentioned; the title of the bloody thing is We Don’t Need No Education: Belief, and the Expurgation of US Public School Literature Texts in Response to Activist Beliefs.

Submissions Open

Over the course of the year we spent organising last month's hybrid writing conference my professional web evolved in new and unforeseen directions, mostly because organising a conference puts you in touch with new and interesting people. And one of the things that's come out of getting in touch with all of those new people is that I'm now involved with a publishing venture.

Seam Editions seeks to provide a home, both online and in print, for writing that plays with the boundaries between creative writing and criticism. If that seems a bit open-ended, it's because we're hoping that people will send us work that surprises us, and that subverts traditional concepts of fiction, poetry, criticism, etc. in ways that we haven't thought of. There are a few more details on the submissions page, where you can also find the address to send work and queries. At the moment we're accepting unsolicited submissions, so if you have something that you think might fit, it never hurts to sling it our way. And if you don't write, or don't write this sort of work, feel free to come over and read - there's a little Christmas Present up on the website for the curious.

Zero to maudlin in no time at all

In fifteen days I'm (touch wood) going to drop one electronic and two physical copies of my thesis on the weird partition thing in the PGR office, sign some paperwork, and walk out of there a free agent. This should be anxious-making, given how far the thesis is from being ready to be born, but every time I start to try to worry about that I start getting wibbly over the fact that I've only got seventeen or so more days of living in Norwich.

Finishing the thesis seems reason enough to get wibbly, but true to form I've managed to muddle life up enough that several things change once I hand the work over. Finishing means finally moving in with that guy (what was his name?) that I married two and a half years ago. It means not staying in school like adults always told me to because I've finally run out of school to stay in. It means not being a dog of a university for the first time in nearly a decade. Changing the way my friendships work, now that I'm leaving behind the people that were always around and inserting myself into the lives of the people that I was always leaving behind. Putting to bed the late nights and unhealthy habits that got me through the last however many years. Saying goodbye to Norwich

Weirdly enough, the thought that seems to make me the most wibbly is that it means giving up the first apartment I lived in as a self-sufficient adult, even though the heating's all but gone and I hate being away from Dave (that was his name!) and the neighbours' music keeps me awake during the day because I don't need their help to not sleep at night. I felt the same way when I helped my little brother move his things out of his bedroom in our parents' house and into the place he now shares with his wife, the feeling of stepping from one room to the next and realising that you're not able to step back, that there's no 'back' to step into because the only place it exists any more is in your head.

Change is hard, even when it's good change. And even though there are many good things beginning because of what is ending - no more missing game nights and parties in Reading because I'll be at school, no more saying goodbye to Dave, no more busted heating and ridiculous deadlines and all the other things that make this unsustainable as a permanent lifestyle - I'm going to let myself be sad for just a little bit longer.

'Sad' isn't exactly the right word. 'Hiraeth' is probably better, only in part because it is one of Dave's words.  The place I've come to love, and the person I've become, are both so much more than I hoped they would be when I fetched up at the last station on the train route in 2012 with a coat too thin for the weather, not enough money to live on, and the niggling feeling that I wasn't good enough to be there. And neither becoming has been deliberate: Norwich has grown on me as I've grown into myself, haphazardly and often in a panic, with too much attention paid to what must be done for any to be given to what the effect might be of doing it. In a way I'm glad that I had no idea what would happen when I first got here, because even after having made the trip, I still don't understand how I got from there to here. That's the way I write books, I guess it makes sense it's the way I live life.

Of course, while letting oneself get wibbly as a chapter rustles to a close is in human nature, the close of a chapter tends to be where its most vital to fill each unforgiving minute with sixty seconds worth of distance run, to bastardise a phrase. And, despite the years that I've already put into it, the thesis could still benefit from a little more work.

I guess I can run a ways further.