The Kitschies

Cuddly tentacles were given out on Monday night, in the downstairs of a pub in London. Like the downstairs of a lot of pubs, this one had a pretty low ceiling, which I only noticed when the actual prize-giving began and nearly all the men who took the microphone had to crouch to avoid braining themselves. My memory of the evening is fuzzy - much like the tentacles - probably because I was preoccupied by the fact that MARGARET ATWOOD WAS THERE and MARGARET ATWOOD WAS WEARING A TENTACLE MONSTER.

Photo borrowed from the kitschie's blog with hopes they won't mind. 

Dave kept trying to make me go and say hello to her - it was a small enough event that that wouldn't have been totally weird - and I kept threatening to deck him if he didn't stop, because I'm of the theory that one should never meet one's heroes unless expressly sought out by them, because there lies the path to madness and restraining orders. I was amused to find out that her agent, who was also there and wearing tentacles, was the agent that made my MA year cry in despair many moons ago. Small world, ain't it?

Only tangentially related: I keep hearing that writers never really get famous because people can't pick them out on the street, and I wonder if it's a symptom of my work, of being connected to UEA, or of having an obsessive personality that I do recognise a lot of the well-respected writers on sight, even ones who I don't personally read and have never actually met. I guess it makes it a little less weird that the ones who I recognise immediately, from the back, and across a crowded room (Ali Smith, Helen Dunmore, Kate Mosse... ok, Margaret Atwood) are all people I've met in person. 

All of the books (and video games) on the shortlists sound amazing. Like most book events, the room was decorated with copies from the shortlist, and I managed to make off with a few, but all of them are going onto my to-read list. And books that more closely fit the criteria of progressive and speculative are going onto my to-write list. 

There must have been something either in the air or the water. About halfway through the evening Dave pulled on my sleeve and said, "Golden Ratio." Then, on the eight-minute tube ride to Liverpool Street Station we worked up the outline of an entire speculative novel from that one concept, wrote it down, and moved on to an epic fantasy blending sci-fi and dragons before having to get off. And now it looks like both of us wish we could temporarily abandon responsibility to go write, which is pretty normal for me but less so for Dave. So if I happen to vanish in the near future, it might have something to do with spirals. 

(Not) Procrastinating

I've admitted to myself that continuously refreshing my inbox isn't going to make Jason's notes come any faster, and that hiding under my bed isn't going to make the other work that I should have already done go away, so I've finally settled in to try and do my American taxes. Which are far more confusing than my English taxes, because the tax forms all assume that you're earning in USD, living in the States, and getting all these forms along with your income that don't seem to exist in Britain. Take multiple currencies, add tax years that cover different date ranges, multiply by the number of different income streams, and it will make perfect sense why I've been doing literally anything other than dealing with it.

When I got to be a teenager and started earning money, my parents told me that I shouldn't worry about taxes: my dad would do them until I got married, then my husband would do them until one of us kicked it, and that was the way the world worked. Then when I got to my twenties and had to juggle paying for grad school with a dozen sources of income in four currencies without screwing up enough to land in jail my mom told me to stop stressing about it, my financial situation couldn't possibly be as topsy-turvey as I insisted it was. Now I have an accountant because no one, related by blood or marriage, is willing to touch my taxes without fiscal encouragement, and it's the most I can manage to gather together the documentation; I'd rather go to jail for evasion than file myself.

Come to think of it, my family has a pretty consistent track record for giving me a hard time for worrying about things that they say either won't happen or shouldn't worry me, only for the exact thing I've gotten worked up about to turn out to be exactly as much of an issue as I initially thought it would be. Sometimes it takes weeks, sometimes years, but it seems to always happen - with the exception of my paralysing fear that I'd not get into university.

So I was riffling through my filing cabinet trying to find the documents for the accountant and pulling out writery things for the Archive - and being unprecedentedly proud of myself for not only managing to hang onto all of my payment advice slips from last year, but having them all in the same file AND in the house where the tax doing needs to happen - when I found a bunch of writing from the end of the MA that I'd totally forgotten about. And one of the little bits was a sort of note-to-self in defence of the first person. And since all that sort of thing is going to the Archive I figured it made sense to copy it out here (which is actually why I sat down to write this post in the first place, as opposed to whining about taxes) because it's a question I still haven't heard satisfactorily answered.

A while back I wrote a horror story in which the narrator gets turned into a zombie at the end, and the editor of the anthology it was going in objected to the use of the first person on the grounds that, if the character gets turned into a zombie, how are they narrating the story? Which made me think about the whole idea of first person narrators. Epistolary novels have more or less fallen by the wayside, so in a lot of cases, while a first-person narrator is essentially telling the reader the story, exactly how that is occurring isn't made clear, even if it is technically plausible. In most cases the narrator stays alive to the end, so I suppose it could be argued that they wrote the whole thing down after the fact. Except we all accept that fiction is a construct - the first person narrator isn't the one who has written the story. And so I object to the idea that the question 'how is this person telling us this story?' has to have a logical answer.

What makes less sense? That there's some disembodied consciousness following a bunch of characters around who then records it all once they've offed each other so that an external party can enjoy the account, or that the reader is a parasite in the character's mind and therefore experiencing it all as it happens. Why can't the narrator die at the end? What demands the greater suspension of disbelief: that the narrator dies and yet the narration follows them through death, or the fact that this takes place in a world where black magic is possible and girls can turn their older sisters into zombies?

There aren't many questions that irk me more than 'how is this narration possible?' It's possible because we as a species have developed written language and an appreciation for fiction. It's possible because the narrative hasn't actually been written by the narrator. It exists, therefor it's possible.

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.

Tentacles and paperback reviews

So I found out this afternoon that The Shore has been shortlisted for the Golden Tentacle, the category of The Kitschies ("The prize for progressive, intelligent, and entertaining literature with a speculative element") reserved for debut fiction. The fact that The Shore is being considered spec fic makes me clam-in-mud happy - it also makes me really want to go off and write some properly hardcore speculative fiction, but I've promised to finish the current projects before I start anything else. There are five books on the shortlist, and I'm crossing my fingers that I get a chance to get my dirty mitts on the other four. Winners are announced on the 7th of March, which isn't very long to wait at all. And there aren't any poets on the shortlist, so I've got a tiny measure of hope this time.

And while I'm broadcasting news, an author Q&A has gone up on the review site run by Deborah Kalb for anyone who has questions but won't get a chance to ask them. And the Sunday Times ran a review for the paperback edition that was wonderfully positive and used the term 'anti-pastoral.' I'm not sure if I should get that tattooed somewhere or just use it as my work credo - next should come an anti-road novel, then an anti-family drama, and one day maybe an anti-romance if I work really hard.

Usually I dread looking at my email inbox, and doubly dread needing to respond to anything, but after having all of that come in today I'm almost feeling downright fond of the monstrosity...

Flight and The Fiddlehead

About a decade ago, when I first found out that the literary magazines I nicked from the library and read samples from online accepted submissions from pretty much anyone, I made a hit list of the magazines where I most desperately wanted to be published one day. In the top three was The Fiddlehead, Canada's longest living journal. Given its reputation I figured I had not a chance but continued submitting anyway, since regular rejection letters are like strength training for the soul.

So I am pretty well ecstatic to say that "Flight," one of the pieces that was cut from the final edit of The Shore, appears in the Winter 2016 issue.

This issue, in fact.

"Flight" was one of my favourite stories. It was probably the most difficult to write and definitely took the most research - it involves rockets, NASA, and the 1950s - but since it's about an outsider coming to the Shore for the first time, and since the book was more than a little over length until the bitter end, it fell prey to the red pen. The book mostly focuses on one family, and this was one of the few pieces that could be taken out without disturbing the threads that connected all the rest.

But that doesn't matter now, because rather than languishing in a desk drawer the story is snugged up in an issue of a magazine in which I thought I'd never be good enough to have a place. And just in case the prospect of getting another nibble of the islands and the ponies isn't enough to tempt you over to The Fiddlehead's website for a copy of the issue, here's a glance at the opening:

It's probably time to invest in a new camera...

Paperback

I poke my nose above the drift of books and papers to say that, after having moved around quite a bit, the UK release date for the paperback edition of The Shore is February 25th! Though they lack the bludgeoning capabilities of hardback, I've always had a soft spot for softcover books - they seem more tactile, and they tend to be easier to lug around. A hardback belongs on the shelf where it can look impressive, a paperback belongs in the hand. And I always feel like I've committed a crime when my hardcover books get mussed, while the softcovers need the mussing to feel broken in and comfortable.

The US release date shouldn't be far behind, but I'm blowed if I can figure out when it is. My guess is that it will also move around a bit and then leap out when no one suspects - as so much in publishing seems to do.

On the topic of things leaping out unexpected: I've gotten back into the horrible habit of inbox watching, because any minute now either or both of my editors will send through their final stack of notes for The Lauras. Until that happens I'm stuck plodding responsibly on with postgraduate work, which wouldn't be that bad except I know that the moment that I start enjoying it the edits will come and I'll have to abandon censorship for the sake of finishing the book on time. I'm a bit tempted to get some chalk and the Harry Potter books and see if I can bastardise a spell into summoning edits in my kitchen - I was never allowed to read Harry Potter because it apparently taught you how to do magic, but given the time crunch I'm pretty sure a little magic would be more than justified.

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.