Digging myself out

The end of term felt a little like re-entering Earth's atmosphere, with extra emphasis on the high-speed-towards-the-ground part, possibly because I dealt with the impossible workload by getting up early, staying up late, and eating exactly what my internal toddler demanded. So now that all of the really important deadlines are past it feels not so much like I've hit the wall as become embedded in the wreckage that was wall before I came at it at terminal velocity. I may have completely stopped responding to emails. And phone calls. And text messages. And my own name.

But on the upside, I'm in Reading once again with the work that I enjoy and free access to David's sweaters. And yesterday The Shore came out in the USA and Canada, which I've been looking forward to for so long that I completely blanked on the date - first I forgot that it hadn't come out already, then I forgot it was May already. Then my mother sent me this:

In hindsight, I'm really glad that I've got the next few projects on the go; if I'd waited until now to start the next thing I'd probably be too intimidated to begin. Although I've been told off recently by several people for having more than one project on the go at once, so there may indeed be no way to win at this besides utterly transcending my personal flaws.

Also also, somewhere in there I managed to come up with the bare bones of an author's website, almost as if I am a real, live adult!

It's possible that the only thing that is saving me at the moment is that I've got two books to work on at once. One book is at the first draft stage, and I found a while back that if I spend too much of the day writing I stop being able to speak. The other book is going through its first full revision, and if I spend too much of the day revising I usually manage to retain my powers of speech, but stop making any logical sense. So the net result is that I have one project to keep me busy in the morning, the other to keep me busy in the afternoon, and have generally stopped talking or making sense.

The first draft of the book for Henry is a little more than two thirds done, and looks like this: 

The closed notebook is full, the open notebook has about ten thousand words in it, and it's hard to tell from the photograph but the three sheets of A4 are the latest version of the outline and all but part three is checked off. And one of those pens has a very flat spot in the nib tip from dramatic overuse. 

 So, in an effort to preserve the tipping of my other pens I've switched back to bottled ink - cartridges are fun for variety, but they tend to flow slower than I write, which leads to drying up and scratching and nibs not lasting as long as they should.

The other piece of work (and it is a piece of work in every sense of the word) looks like this:

This is the novel that I wrote during the MA - in case I never said while I was working on it, it follows a woman and her kid on a trip across America in an attempt to settle a lifetime's worth of unfinished business. The stack on the left is the 149 pages that I've so far annotated for revision, and the so much smaller stack on the right are the 50 pages that still need to be gone through. Which, all things considered, isn't all that much left to comb through. This one will probably get a second go-through as I'm putting the ink and paper edits into the Word document, but I'm starting to get a sense of what shape it might be when it's finished - and starting to get a sense that it will be finished sooner than later. And, publishing aside, that's the really exciting part.

"The greatest joy in life lies in doing those things that you have been told you cannot do."

On Wednesday I skibbled down to London to listen to Nick Harkaway, Anna Smaill, and Helena Coggan converse about writing in general and their latest books in particular. Harkaway's eyebrows stole the show. If they hadn't, his suit would have. Together they almost completely distracted everyone from the fact that Coggan is fifteen years old, a fact which I'm hoping will deflect some of the age-related side-eye I've been getting and will probably continue to get for a while. I don't know where this pressure for precocity comes from, but I do wish a bit that someone would hook up sensors to a pregnant woman, transcribe the fetus' brain waves, and publish the results as the novel written by the youngest author ever so we can all stop worrying about age - until someone figures out how to get electrical readings off a zygote, that is. No one has any control over their age, so it baffles me a bit that we make anything of it. But then, there is still a part of my flinty heart that longs to be the youngest winner of the Booker.

While in London I dropped in to see Jason and Anna and all of the wonderful people that get to work in the lovely book warren that is Random House. They had been expecting a box from the publisher, which the publisher insisted had been sent and the RH post room insisted had not, and at the end of the day it turned out that the box had accidentally been mixed in with some trade paperbacks in the publisher's warehouse.

Which is why I had a packet come in the mail this morning:

I give you: hardback!

I had copies of the proof to throw around, but they only show so much of how the book will look when it's done. For instance, I didn't know it was going to be purple. Ok, technically, it's mulberry. Which makes me happy because I love purple and I spent just gobs of my childhood getting mulberries into my face as quickly as humanly possible.

I have read so many books with that windmill embossed on the front. 

Joyously and surprisingly enough, some of the people to whom the proofs were sent actually read them, and read them in time to have an opinion. And then were kind enough to provide that opinion:

And while they are all very nice quotes, one in particular made me completely and utterly lose all composure:

When I asked them to send a proof to Maureen Duffy, I didn't imagine she would actually read it.

So there was a moment of joy and satisfaction, but as I was paging through - not looking too closely, because I know that if I do I will find a mistake - the thought crept into my head: I was twenty-two when I wrote this book. I bet I could do so much better now... 

Oh dear...

Day of reckoning

This morning, a box came.

BOX!

And inside it were these:

BOOKS!

I'll be off in the corner doing the mad scientist laugh for a little while. 

COLOPHON!