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.

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.

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.

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.

The wreck's progress

About a week ago, as I was toddling back up to Norwich, I realised how many days weren't left in January. But my sense of time is rather bad, so I didn't start seriously fretting until I got the email from Jason that essentially ran, 'It's the last week of the month... where's the book?' At which point literally everything else was dropped, and anything that couldn't be dropped I brought my computer along to so that I could tweak lines during slack moments. So on Friday at half two in the afternoon, while sitting in the postgrad bar, I found myself unexpectedly at the end once again. And I sent the new draft off to Jason before I could talk myself into messing with it some more. And then I walked home feeling like my arm had dropped off, because it's been the only thing I've thought about in the past month and suddenly not needing to think about it felt wrong.

And then I got sick again. 

I've always spent term time getting whatever was going around, but this year's been a little ridiculous.  It's gotten to the point that I grab cold medicine every time I get groceries, because I know it'll be used. 

Between having finished a major project and spending the weekend being useless and miserable, I figured a reward was in order. So I went to the children's section of the uni library (we have a children's section; it is excellent) and had a poke around. And found this:

My love for this book and the age when I first read it probably explains a lot. 

When I was nearly nine my parents moved us from a tiny house right down the street from my aunt to a much bigger house in the county where most of the dying in the American Civil War took place, and where everyone I met was (is) still obsessed with it. 

I hated it. 

The only redeeming feature of the place was the size and quality of its library system. My sister was born weeks after the move, so no one paid much attention to what I was getting out. So the first (and for a while, the only) thing that made me happy in that place was Joan Aiken's books. After a while I began branching out, but I still vividly remember sitting on the cold kitchen floor on a blazing June afternoon, all the lights off and no one making a sound because Dinky and Mom were asleep, reading Blackhearts on Battersea as slowly as I could because it was almost over and I didn't want to come back to reality. They were the books that first made me want to see England - and now that I have seen England they're more than overdue for a re-read.

The cover's different from the one I first read, but the illustrations are the same!

And on the subject of books: when I got back a heap of them were waiting for me, because I'd had the presence of mind to do all of my overseas ordering before I left for Christmas. There are some good ones that I've been looking for for a while, but my favourite by far is:

Answer: it depends on whether or not you consider teaching your kids critical thinking to be 'harming' them. 

I'm still useless and miserable, but the next book is one step closer to done. Next should come line notes, then copyeditor's notes and page proofs, then a bound proof, then it's all over but the shouting. And when I think of it that way, August doesn't seem far away at all. 

Revision and paperback

I've been eaten by revisions. Which is preferable to being eaten by my thesis; at least my editor gives positive feedback. Last Monday I sat down and rewrote the first thirty pages. On Tuesday I realised that the rewrite was crap and re-rewrote the first thirty pages. On Wednesday I woke up with the conviction that the version from a year ago was actually much better than I first thought and used it to rewrite the re-rewrite. This weekend Dave went down to Brighton and I stayed home and did my night-owl thing and managed to hit the halfway point.

Behold: the editorial notes. Though about two pages of that is notes to self. 

 People have said that the reason it's called 'revision' is that it's a process of re-seeing, more than rewriting. You have to see what's on the page with clear eyes before you can know what it needs to make it better. In my case it's more a process of re-digesting; now that I've gotten to the midpoint the little voice in my head keeps chiming in with comments like 'you know, what you really need to do to chapter 2 is...' And then I have to go back to chapter 2, which does usually make chapter 2 better but makes the whole longer, which is a problem in its own right because the whole needs to lose about twenty thousand words of deadweight before it can be called finished.

About the point last week where I was despairing of ever getting to page 31, I got a surprise through the mail slot:

It has spot gloss

And creepy people

I've got a weakness for book-related art. It's not so common to find people's impression of a book transmuted into another form, and seeing how someone else would present my work visually makes me as excited as the existence of the physical book does. Which is a level of excited that is pretty difficult to touch; I've got a weakness for paperbacks.

The innards have been dressed up, too!