And breathe!

And somehow four months slipped past while I was somehow not paying attention. This either has to do with the amount of work that's currently up in the air and never seems to be entirely cleared away, or one of my favorite truisms: regardless of how much or little you have to do, it will expand or contract to perfectly fit all available time. I keep thinking that after the next project is due I will have a space to breathe, collect my thoughts, and maybe do something for pure enjoyment, but there is always a next project.

Last year, I tried rock climbing (again), because I wanted to get over my fear of heights. And even though I was quite proud of myself the first time I managed to get six feet off the ground without getting dizzy and refusing to move, I quickly realized why the sport is such an apt metaphor for life. It's fun to scramble up and down the easy routes that you've done before. It reminds you that you can actually climb. But if you want to improve at all, you have to push yourself. And when you're really pushing yourself, especially if you're a muscularly-challenged female that gets faint on balconies, each new handhold feels like the most impossible thing you've ever done. And when you do manage to swing yourself in just the right way so as to progress a few inches upward you can only be proud for so long, because the next handhold will now be the most impossible thing you've ever done. And so it will continue until you run out of places to put your hands.

We discussed in Theory and Practice of Fiction last week how the present moment, and therefor our enjoyment of the present moment, only lasts three seconds. (The assigned reading was on neurobiology and physiology and its relationship to consciousness and time.) Three seconds is about as long as my overwhelming joy at grabbing the next hold while ten feet up lasts, and about half as long as my acceptance letter happy dance lasts, because acceptance letters are rare and I try and savor that feeling as long as possible. But after the moment, there's the next handhold to grab, and the next piece to write - or, if I'm really courageous, the next PhD application. 

Frequently I forget, as I'm scrabbling to read assigned material and make deadlines, that I'm making any progress at all. And though I can't quantify what I've learned, or when I've learned it, I can feel its influence. When I look at the pieces I wrote last year and before I'm quite embarrassed, which apparently happens to most artists who consistently work on their craft, but unlike before I now know what to change in order to fix those old pieces, to make them into something I can be willing to acknowledge as mine. 

And, for the sake of pure self-indulgence, an example of a handhold made where elation lasted beyond a single moment: UEA hosted a women's fencing tournament yesterday, and I beat all three of the sabruers on Oxford's women's team. That possibly made up for never having been able to go to school in Oxford. If you can't join 'em, beat 'em with a +10 aggregate indicator and gloat quietly while flexing your nearly nonexistent biceps. Now if only they'd let me fence on the men's team...

Impossible Dreams

Everyone has them, or at least ought to have them: goals that they want to reach that are just on the other side of believability. Not the ones that involve conquering a country or elaborate revenge, though those are probably doable for some people. I mean the things that seem out of reach now, but might be possible if the dice fall the right way.

I used to think that living in England was one of those pipe dreams, along with royalties (of any amount) and getting into a Master's program. And now I'm here. Other pipe dreams have taken their place:

• Walking the coast of England for mental health research and awareness.
• Getting into and through a PhD program in one piece.
• Living in a country where the official language isn't English.
• Telling my dad to go buy a copy of the New Yorker so he can turn to a specific page and see my name.
• Selling a novel. Heck, selling three novels and being able to buy food from them. 
• Going back to the home I dream about. 
• Living without medication. Or mandatory doctor's appointments. 
• Not having to worry about visas and length of stay while I'm in the UK. 
• Fencing in the Olympics.

Ok, maybe the last one is a little far-fetched, but the rest could possibly happen, if I make them happen. Which makes me wonder, how many dreams have I let die because I couldn't see how to get there from where I was standing? And how many dreams have others let die for the same, or similar reasons? And the biggest question: Why?

Anthology Launch!

It's here: the Deep Cuts Horror anthology. 19 short stories, and recommendations of dozens more, all intended to thrill, chill, and etc; it's a pretty hefty volume for the money. You can find a table of contents here, and the book itself is available from Amazon electronically, and will be available in paperback and from other venues imminently.

My contribution to this is titled "Practical Necromancy," in the 'mayhem' section of the book, though it is much more coherent than the drivel that I normally post here. The story is about three sisters as they deal with the aftermath of their parents' death by turning to work, love, and black magic. There is also defenestration. The original title was 'All Through the Night,' after a lullaby my dad used to sing. It contains the line 'I my loving vigil keeping all through the night,' which is ironic in the context of the story, but not everyone knows the song, so the title was changed.

I never expected that the first book in which my work would be featured would be a horror collection, but that doesn't mean I'm not thrilled. The piece was as difficult to write as any of the literary fiction I've done, but was still one of the most enjoyable pieces that I've written.

Edit: Oh look! It's also available from Amazon.co.uk! I was not expecting that. 

Technical difficulties

The apocalypse didn't happen! Unfortunately, no one told my computer that. It proceeded to give itself a Viking funeral the day that the world didn't end, and as I was on the road the bastard didn't go into the shop until yesterday. The money that was going to become a pair of boots that don't leak and a waterproof jacket - as well as a few months of food that isn't eggs and rice - will now be turned into a new motherboard, with fingers crossed that all that cash will rescucitate the thing. C'est la vie. There will, hopefully, be more and more pertinent thoughts once I've regained the lost ground; coursework deadlines are less than a week away and I'm not sure at this point what to toss out in order to keep the slavering beasts at bay.

Random tip - when you're in a foul mood and a lecturer asks a stupid question via e-mail, log off and walk away until you can give an answer that doesn't strip paint and melt bone with its pure acidity. And yes, lecturers ask stupid questions.

Oh frabjous day, callooh callay!

It's snowing - and sleeting occasionally, but thank god it isn't raining. No, wait, and it's raining again. Henry Sutton flat out told me that Norfolk is the driest part of England; at this point I'm thinking that he was having me on. You don't have to be green and wear pointy shoes to dissolve here.

End of term is looming, which means there are suddenly heaps of deadlines. I've been doing edits for the anthologies that are coming out around/just before Christmas, because that's the best way I can think of to procrastinate writing my PhD proposal. Yeah, I do a double-take too, when I think that: I've got no business getting near a PhD, I can't even eat a chocolate ice cream without getting it all over my face. But better a PhD than a child at this point, and I'd rather spend the next three years writing a novel than chasing a toddler. Literary criticism has a special place in my heart, or possibly some other organ as it gets me irrationally excited, and the only way I can see to spend three more years semi-affordably studying it is to stick it out wherever I can get funding.

Last week I attended a reading by D. W. Wilson from his book of shorts Once You Break a Knuckle. It was a cosy event, as Wilson is a PhD candidate at UEA and a veteran of their MA program, so it's perfectly acceptable to have him sit on the drinks table to read while we all pack around. He's Canadian by birth, but the story that he read reminded me of home, and his presence there was a reminder of the adage "never say never." There is no market for short story collections from unknown authors, but his first published book is one such collection. Rejection slips get everyone down, but all you need is one acceptance to get a work in print. Winning the BBC prize for one of the pieces in the collection certainly helped procure that acceptance, but if he hadn't submitted to the prize in the first place, he never would have won.

At the end of the evening, one of the other students asked him for the advice that he would give his younger self. He said that most people insist that you can't make a living writing, that you have to find some worthwhile work and write in the margins, but that's just bull. If writing is the work that you have to do, the work you want to do, do everything you can to make it your work. Life can work out around it.

Of course, that can only happen if you keep on submitting.

"murder your babies"

Chloe showed up in my bedroom while I was working on my PhD proposal the other day. She lay down on my comforter with her boots on, started eating my after 8 mints, and asked when I was going to do something with her already.

I’ve got a relationship with some of my characters. Maybe this is a common thing, I have no way of knowing, but in my case it’s funny because of the way I write. Literary short stories are taken slowly, built from the ground up, carefully researched; if I spend enough time on it, the characters become real to me. It’s not a conscious thing, I don’t sit down as I’m working and decide what her favorite food is or how she feels about her mother, but I come to know these details through proximity with the character – this means that every character in the 16-story cycle that is my undergraduate dissertation has a fully realized backstory, and each of those stories has at least three important characters.

That’s the literary fiction. The money I’ve made from writing has come from writing to prompts and selling to specific markets. It’s usually three days between when I find a call for submissions and when I send out a piece, if it takes me much longer to come up with something chances are it’s not going to be good in time to be submitted for that prompt. Usually in this case the characters leap up fully realized as well, though not quite as three dimensionally as when I’ve had time to hang out with them. And if the story is more dependent on plot than character – romance usually, because when you’ve got a 3,000 word limit kissing is more important than character development – they might be more cardboard cutouts with names than real people.

The less real the characters are to me, the less I mind changing the story to satisfy the market. The opposite is also true.

Chloe has been floating around in my psyche for five years now. I’ve tried to write her story over and over, but it clunked every time. I couldn’t get a handle on her or her situation, but I knew she was there. The summer before my senior year I lived in a tiny house on the edge of the barrier islands in Virginia, with no phone, no internet and no friends. I’d been directed to draft out the beginning of my Honors project and had no ideas, so I spent a lot of time crabbing, sunning, and target shooting. One of those afternoons with my brother’s gun on our upstairs porch, thinking about the ex that wasn’t leaving me alone, I wondered how hard it would be to shoot someone. And Chloe appeared, and allowed herself to be frantically drafted. Since I’m lazy, her house is that house, adjusted very slightly. Of course, my advisor eventually axed the lines that were my door into her story, the lines that I began with and that I liked best. They do say kill your darlings, a piece of wisdom I often misquote as “murder your babies.” And it doesn’t matter, as I still have Chloe: almost thirteen, dirty, foul-mouthed, quiet, nearly feral, mostly self-sufficient, and borderline sociopathic. She’d probably be my favorite even if she hadn’t been my door into so many things. And sometimes she shows up unexpectedly, gets her feet all over my furniture, and tells me that there’s more coming, she’s just not sure where from yet. So I wait for an editor who doesn’t want me to make her a nice girl, doesn’t want me to erase her sociopathic tendencies, because I feel like I owe this character something, if only her integrity.

And, since I like them and want them to go somewhere, here are those lines that I took out in the final draft:

Sometimes, when I’m holding the .22 like that, getting a careful sight on my target and breathing out really slow, I wonder how much harder it would be to shoot a real person. It’s a bigger target, so I’m guessing it would be easier, but they say that when it comes to shoot someone with a face, that’s got a name and is looking at you, even real soldiers have a hard time doing it. Maybe that’s why so many people get shot in the back, like Cabel Bloxom. Before he died, I would be up on the porch shooting, and wonder if I’d be able to shoot him if he did come for me and Renee, like he said he would. Or, I would wonder if I’d be able to keep from shooting him. Everyone around here knows we’re home on our own all summer long. They say that Mama ran off to Atlantic City, but I know better. If someone came after us, there would be no one but me to stop them. 

Call me a creeper, but...

I have a habit of listening to Americans on the bus.

You can't really help it if you're in the top of a crammed double decker, it's not like we're divided into private compartments and I've got a glass pressed to the wall. Usually I overhear people's conversations, and usually I ignore them, but American accents make me prick up my ears. Part of it could be that the only people I've heard talking louder on public transportation are Australians, otherwise no one beats us for volume.

UEA has a pretty international base of students, and a lot of the Americans I hear are in the country for the first time, as undergrads on a year abroad. Usually they're whining. If they're with another American they're whining about how the Brits Don't Get It, and if they're with a Brit they're whining about the subtle differences in culture that they didn't expect.

Maybe a few years ago I wouldn't have heard it as whining. The English tend to put a more positive, diplomatic spin on things, which makes my countrymen seem rude in comparison. Even though they embarrass me - though no where near as much as the Bush administration did - I still have the weird urge to go talk to them. Spending time with other Americans in general isn't any more appealing than spending time with people from my course - less so, probably, since we'd have much less to talk about - but hearing the out-of-place accent cutting through the somnolent air makes me wonder where they're from, how they wound up so far from home, whether they'll come around and never want to go back, or rush home at the first chance and get laughs from friends and family talking about the little differences in lifestyle that so annoy them now. Stories appeal to me, and every time I watch one of them walk off the bus ahead of me I regret not having the guts to call them out while exposing my own not-belonging-ness for the sake of answering the questions: why here, why now, why you, what next?

It doesn't matter, by the way, how I feel about the Bush administration personally. The year of undergrad I spent here I spoke as little as possible, because every time I opened my mouth someone would declare "You're an American!" like they'd just discovered the secret of the universe, and then demand I explain what brand of moron voted for Bush, supported his policies, and was generally responsible for their view of the U.S. It got so prevalent that by Christmas my standard introduction was "I'm an American, I'm so sorry, I wasn't old enough to vote in the last election so please don't hold me responsible for my country." It's hard to be proud of your country when every time you go for a pint some drunk wants to lynch you because of its foreign policy.

And, regardless of how I voted in yesterday's election, I'm glad it turned out how it did: the English do not approve of Romney in the slightest and I'm just not up for another four years of apologizing for being an American.