Into the breach

Monday tips us squarely into Week 3 of the undergrad academic calendar and my maiden experience of teaching undergrads in a UK university. Strangely enough, it is neither very different from what I imagined nor from what I've done other places, other times, with other students; the biggest surprise was that the Creative Writing students all but refuse to speak, while the critical students appear to have an abject horror of silence.

I've been given two seminars of a lecture/seminar based class called Writing Texts, which turns out to be one of the foundational theoretical modules for the entire Literature degree, and includes reading by Barthes and Bakhtin and Kant and Nietzsche and Auerbach and Aristotle and lots and lots of linguistics and theory and things that one can't simply pretend to have read. Naturally, the students in one of my seminars continuously attempt to pretend that they have done the reading, which leads to lots of silences that they seem to find ravingly uncomfortable. Not being a student any more, I have nothing but love for the awkward silences, and watching them avoid eye contact by any means possible in the hopes that I won't call on them, and I wonder if all of the professors I had in undergrad felt the same way. The best part of it, though, is being faced with material that I've never seen before (linguistics, Bakhtin) or haven't seen in years (Aristotle, Kant) and having to know it well enough to explain it in several different ways in time for the seminar class. The worst part is that the lecture component, which I have to base the seminar discussion on, takes place 25 hours before my first Texts seminar, so I have, at best, half a day to really wrap my head around the material, make a seminar plan, and figure out some exercises for them to do in class that will really be helpful instead of just give me some breathing room. I'm surprised that the challenging part is getting the material cold, rather than having to keep myself composed around human beings for an extended period of time. 

Somehow, I also wound up with an Intro Creative writing class. And someone, some how, screwed up the room bookings for this term, so I have all three classes on Tuesday. Which might not sound like much, but it's the absolute maximum number of classes that the university is allowed to have a PhD candidate take on, and with seminar planning and marking and three hours of office hours a week it means that Friday is the only day I really manage to get any of my own work done. Creative Writing especially takes up quite a bit of time, since I essentially wrote my own syllabus, plan my own assignments, select my own content, write my own exercises, read the material that I make them write, and determine how much lecturing I'm actually going to make them sit through on a given week. So planning for the writing class takes up at least double what planning for Texts does, and I can't do either too far ahead of time or else I forget what I meant when I wrote "Nietzsche's first metaphor and second metaphor - what is third metaphor/relate to Ong on translation." 

But all in all, I'm enjoying teaching. The material is challenging, and the students are interesting, and I get ridiculously happy when the Texts students make a difficult connection or suddenly understand something. The writing students always make me ridiculously happy, as, unlike pretty much everyone else I've ever taught/tutored/lectured to they seem to really want to be there, and they throw themselves fully into the prompts that I give them. 

Besides the teaching, my critical supervisor has said that I should start looking into publishing some thesis content in a peer reviewed journal, since I've already blazed past the length requirement and am only halfway finished. And The Shore comes out in two months. So all in all, life is good. 

A brief interlude (real information to follow when the deadline has been met)

I'm sitting at my (mostly clean) desk at the moment drinking hot toddies and wrangling with the same critical chapter that I've been working on since July. Fortunately, this time there are no elf footprints involved, though I do have the 1973 edition of a fiction textbook open next to me for reference. A fiction textbook, may I say, that manages to consist entirely of extracts from popular children's and young adult fiction (of the time) and yet only contains four female protagonists in nearly six hundred pages and approximately 35 pieces of fiction; they are a whale (of indeterminate type), a dragon, a little girl of the everyday sort, and a princess.

I have read this book at least a dozen times so far; the extracts that I've picked specifically to support my arguments I've been over more frequently. But it's been mostly fun, because quite a few of the pieces in the book are extracted from novels I read as a kid.

Which made me realize something.

Most of the fiction that was available to me as a child and young adult was about boys becoming men and girls becoming their doorprizes; all of the books that stuck with me were about boys struggling to find their places in the world so that they could be recognized as Men. And since there weren't any other fully fleshed out characters around, I identified with those boys; and when I was a confused adolescent I identified with their struggle towards an elusive but noble Manhood. And then after all of that vicarious living, my parents were mystified at my hostility to their insistence that I act like a lady. I knew, by then, exactly what happened to ladies: even if they didn't get killed so that the boy-man could have some personal growth or emotional epiphany, nothing worthwhile really happened to them.

I'm still waiting to be called on my quest, to be given the sword that proves that I am the long-lost son of whomever, and to fight my way to take my place as rightful king of nowhere and rule with a firm but kind ethos. And I still wonder why, when I've been give the option to see myself as the lost prince, the once and future king, the assistant pig keeper, I'm expected to choose instead to be the baby-minder who never gets to go anywhere.

Oh look, it's January again.

This weekend I had a first that I never anticipated: my spouse-thing loaded my stuff into the car and drove me up to school. As opposed to my parents doing it, or me doing it myself, which is how it's always happened. And then he did the unforgivable and left me there. Granted, he took me to get a second bookshelf first, and took me to the really big grocery store that I can't walk to, and carried all my heavy stuff up to the fourth floor. But when we ran out of weekend he left, and I sulked. And then I realized how much I have to get done, and I stopped sulking and started panicking.

I've said before that one of the unfair things about academia is that January is smack dab in the middle of the year for us, as opposed to the new beginning that 'most everyone else gets. It also happens to be, I realize now, a serious crunch time: there are funding deadlines, and coursework deadlines, and submission deadlines, and tax deadlines, and all kinds of other nasty deadlines, and all I want to do is sleep until it starts staying light out for more than six hours of the day.

In the plus column, I now have the module outlines for both of the classes that I start teaching in exactly one week! Teaching is a special source of terror for me, because it highlights all of the cultural differences that I usually get to blissfully ignore. What do I call my superiors? Is the thing I'm teaching technically called a module, a class, a seminar? Am I missing something that a person that was educated in this system would take for granted, and that the system takes my knowing for granted? Luckily, both my course conveners are incredibly sweet, so I'm hoping that the term won't be an unmitigated disaster. And, as terrified as I am of any occasion that involves me interacting in person with anyone that I'm not married to or sibling to, I'm actually kinda excited that I get to teach. It makes me feel like almost a real adult.

Also in the plus column, one of the three modules (classes? sections? pluots?) I'm teaching is Intro Creative Writing, and, as long as I don't change the graded work guidelines, I get to put whatever I want on the syllabus. Funnily enough, 'my future creative writing class' is something that I've thought about before, and I even have a file where I've been stashing favorite exercises and handouts from classes I've taken, just in case I ever get to teach my own. I say 'funnily' because last summer my mother was shocked that I'd never done the same for 'my future wedding.' Diff'rent strokes, Ma.

Speaking of weddings, I've meant for a while now to write something about that, because it was a seriously surreal experience. When we got engaged at the beginning of the year I told Dave that I was worried about all of the traditional trappings, and he told me I was being paranoid; six months later we got one card too many addressed to 'Mr. and Mrs. David W---' and he went off on the most wonderful rant against the patriarchy I have ever heard. But that will have to happen after I've written the syllabus for my (!) creative writing class.

To Hemingway, or not to Hemingway? That is the question.

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!

Oh, bugger...

I've been working on one critical chapter since about July now. Almost all of that has been the initial legwork, which should be completely finished before I try writing anything so that I don't miss important bits. Methodology and all that. For this chapter, I need to compare five editions of one 544 page textbook and note down all of the changes that were made. Which gets kinda disheartening, especially when I've spent days comparing two versions and the only thing I can put in my spreadsheet is '1986 edition has new intro, no other changes.'

It's a process that takes a lot of time, but a few weeks ago I started wondering why it's taken this much time. It felt like I was looking at the same things over and over. Which essentially I was, but I was approaching singularity levels of deja vu. And try as I might, I have the recall ability of a stunned ferret, so for a while I figured I was just mistaken, or there were errors in my notes.

I only started getting suspicious when I went back to a text that I know I'd compared to three other versions and could only find one set of markings in it. When I mark up the textbooks I do it in hi-lighter, with each edition having a designated color. 1973 is yellow, 1976 is pink, 1980 is green, you get the idea. The copy of the book I was looking at only had blue marks.

I don't own a blue hi-lighter.

Part of the whole stunned-ferret thing is that I don't usually trust myself to remember things correctly - hey, I might have a blue hi-lighter, it might even be my favorite hi-lighter, and I just have no recollection of that right now. So instead of coming to the obvious conclusion, I did an experiment over a weekend:

If that looks green to you, consider adjusting your monitor settings. 

And then I looked more closely at the places that I could have sworn I had already marked up.

Do you see the little elfin footprints that are all that remain of my notes?

Verdict: I am not hopelessly slow and disorganized, or going crazy. The [redacted] paper is eating my [redacted] notations. 

I can't wait to see my supervisor's face when I tell why I haven't had any work to show her in six months.

The editorial process - with pictures!

Somewhere near the end of September, the first round of editorial notes for The Shore popped up in my inbox. Since I was in the middle of making a wedding happen at the time, I wailed in desperation once, plowed through them as thoroughly as possible, and winged the result back to my editor. I'm not sure if it's the same across the board, but in this case the notes consisted of a list of comments regarding specific pages and lines, and a shorter list of comments on the general structure and content. For the most part they were about things that had been bothering me already; the biggest change was cutting out one chapter and dividing the longest chapter into two, a massive change which massively improves things but that I wouldn't have had the resolution to do on my own.

Fast forward a month or so (thankfully to the other side of the wedding) and a two-inch thick printed version of the manuscript arrived by post, having been thoroughly gone over by a copyeditor:

The fuzzyness isn't so much to prevent spoilers as me needing to get a better camera.

Besides the little squiggles having to do with typographical corrections and consistent punctuation, the copyeditor also sent a batch of notes. Most of them were exceedingly useful - like everyone I have a bad tendency to repeat words within paragraphs and pages, and a lot of the dates have been shuffled without being properly double-checked against each other. Other ones... My favorites so far are 'It would be a bit hard to get an entire breast in his mouth, surely?' and 'do roads in the States have a double yellow line up the middle?' 

The notes from the American editor came across while I was halfway through the copyeditor's, so both were dealt with at the same time over a manic four days, because the typesetter needed the finished draft as soon as humanly possible. 

Fast forward to yesterday, and this showed up:

Flat proofs, also two inches thick. These are the same two pages as above, but laid out the way it will look when it's published. I'm a bit in love with the typeface.

This time, instead of working from a list of notes and emailing back my corrections with page and line references, I get to mark up the actual paper with anything (reasonable) I think needs to be changed and mail it back, and a little bit after that a paper-bound copy of the proofs should come winging back.

Fortunately for me, this batch of revisions is a little less urgent: yesterday morning I tried to pick a shirt up off the floor, my lower back went 'I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him,' and now I owe a lifelong debt of gratitude to the doctor at the Reading walk-in clinic for dealing with it compassionately, the NHS for making it free, and my spouse-thing David for all but carrying me there. In the plus column, now I know what diazepam and prescription-strength muscle relaxants feel like, which is something like novocaine only in my brain. In the minus column I am not Hunter S. Thompson, so between the drugs and the fact that there is no position in which it does not feel like the Red Pyramid is ripping out the last foot or so of my spine, I don't foresee anything getting done in the next little while that won't have to be chucked out and done again when I can think clearly.

When I have finished marking up the flat proofs, and the bound proofs come wandering back, they should look a bit like this:

MY BABY HAS A FACE!

I've been keeping the cover to myself since I got it, but now that it's possible to pre-order on Amazon I figure I'm allowed to show it around a little. The above is the UK cover, courtesy of the incomparable Suzanne Dean; the US cover is quite a bit different, though the innards are the same: 

MY BABY HAS TWO FACES!!

This is apparently because the two markets are very different in regards to what kind of covers sell. I'm more than a bit relieved that neither of them involve a tube of lipstick, a stiletto heel, a cosmopolitan glass, or a photograph of half of a woman's face with the gaze directed away from the viewer.

 The US pre-order is here, and the UK pre-order is here; I found out that they existed when my cousin posted them on Facebook about a month ago. I'm still trying to figure out how to keep any relatives or similar individuals whose good opinion I want to retain from seeing them, but that might be a lost cause.  

And now if you will excuse me, there is a sofa with a hot water bottle calling my name. 

A minor miscalculation

Way back in June, I figured that it was probably a good time to concentrate on trying to finish drafting the novel half of my thesis, since novels are, by definition, evil, and this one has a deadline attached to it. And since I couldn't completely drop the critical part and then expect to pick it up again later in the year without suffering setbacks, I figured that the easiest thing would be to work slowly on the chapter that focused on the textbook series that had the most assorted dreck already written about it. Theoretically, that should have meant that most of my work had been done by other people; at the start it looked like a matter of comparing four versions of one book in light of one or two secondary sources. I thought it would be a straightforward task, something to keep my brain in condition.

Oh how wrong I was.

Four months down the line, this is what Dave's dining room table looks like:

There's a box of Lemsip capsules in there somewhere, because of course I've been sick for the last six weeks. 

As it turns out, there were five versions of my primary text, but because of the way that the copyright page is formatted, the 1980 version was impossible to find. It was listed for sale all over the internet, but every time I bought a copy and waited the necessary month or so for it to be shipped from the states, it turned out to be the 1983 or 1986 edition. And as it also happened, the one or two important secondary sources referenced other, equally important secondary sources, which led to a wild secondary source hunt, which eventually led to me adding six other primary source texts to the chapter for the sake of due diligence, because sometimes it's just easier and more sensible to engage with the important sources than to explain why you didn't bother and get called out on it the moment someone with letters after their name looks at what you've written.

So both of my supervisors probably think that I've dropped off the face of the planet, because I haven't had anything worth showing either of them since I started working on this chapter - it hasn't left much time or brain for fiction revision, and the one downside of drafting longhand is that I need a bit of a head start to have even a rough draft to show anyone.

On the plus side, none of the other critical chapters have so many sources, so if I ever finish this one then the beast's back should be well and truly broken. And the novel has hit ~65,000 poorly organized words. And the next critical chapter will be on a classics textbook of which there are only two relevant editions and almost no secondary sources.

Famous last words.