Biting off more than I can chew.

Right now I'm on Long Island, at the Southampton Writer's Conference. Which, I have to admit, I was not as excited for as I should have been, because after seven solid years of workshops it's hard to get keyed up for yet another workshop. Except the entire conference is excellent, and Alan Alda is here, which becomes more relevant if you know that I had elaborate plans to kidnap him when I was fifteen and first found M*A*S*H at my local library. So good workshop, good lectures, good god my high-school celebrity crush is presenting on the importance of accessible and engaging science writing.

It's been a weird summer, which began with the utterly unexpected acquisition (if you can call it that) of an agent and a frantic exodus from Norwich. Then my sister came to be dragged through London, Paris, and assorted bits of the English countryside. Then I went to find my brother in Berlin and succeeded in not killing him while we kicked around, then I flew back to London so I could fly to New York for the conference, and now I am on Long Island, still jetlagged with stress hives, dragging along with me the draft of my dissertation, the draft of my novel with a double-weight of agent's line notes, and the visa paperwork that needs to be filled out and sent in sometime before my current visa expires. So that's where I have been, and hopefully at the end of it there will be a bed, and the time to finish the masses of work that have accrued over the time on the road. And, if I am luck, enough peace for the hives to clear up.

At least I'm not afraid of flying any more.

Live the cliche!

Somewhere between computers becoming widely available and computers becoming easily portable, a lot of people switched over to doing their drafting on a word processor. Which makes sense; it's easier to type fast than to write fast, easier to make changes and save versions, and if your handwriting is a nightmare then it's hard to imagine why you'd want to go back to pen and paper - or pencil and paper, if you've got a thing against ink.

We've still got that fun little cliche image, though: misunderstood writer in the dark corner of the cafe, overpriced drink at their elbow, scribbling at the leather-bound notebook with a real fountain pen. Or typing away at a high-end laptop. 

And I'm ashamed to say that I'm often that cliche. And ashamed to be that cliche, but I haven't found anything that works better.

Pictured: dissertation. Also novel. Also indulgence in irrational craving for blank books.

Computers are beautiful things. I usually draft short stories right into my laptop; with the amount of fact-checking they usually require and the word count limitations they usually have, it just makes sense to pound it all out in word. Novels, on the other hand, are a whole different bag.

When I've got to stick within a word count I like having that little changing number at the bottom of the screen. When I'm going long, it suddenly becomes my enemy. Keeping up momentum is hard enough without having it thrown in my face how far I am from the end every time I sit down to work. And that makes internet procrastination even more irresistible. Which leads to no work getting done. And when you're going on the road for a while, a laptop can get really heavy really fast.

I can't be the only person out there that loves a notebook full of writing.

So I've become the cliche. Technically, I'm not supposed to drink coffee any more, but you don't tell a woman that's run a cafe no more espresso, so I'm only allowed to drink it while I'm working. The notebooks cost pocket change, weigh almost nothing, get taken everywhere and are usually added to in those slack moments when trains are late or professors are late or I'm stuck waiting around. Being a stats junkie, I know that five pages of my writing is about one thousand words, so I can get a word count when I really want, but mostly I just pick up where I left off. And since I can't really go back and waste time tweaking things instead of actually writing, the book gets closer to the end with every Americano I drink. And I'm surprised to find that it is possible to train oneself to be inspired on demand, to produce good work on a schedule. 

Or, as Faulkner so aptly put it, "I only write when I'm inspired. Fortunately I'm inspired at 9 o'clock every morning."

One of those moments

My boyfriend was looking over my shoulder while I was working the other day and came out with, "That's clever! Your blog title is an allusion to 'An Idiot Abroad,' isn't it?"

Apparently he'd never heard of Twain's book. It's a good thing he's pretty.

Dissertation Period

On the calendar it looks like a lovely blank block that one can fill with all one's heart desires. In actuality it consists of meetings and stomach acid. Lots of stomach acid.

Even though nothing else is due until the beginning of September, we are supposed to be drafting our dissertations. And to make sure that we actually are drafting our dissertations, we have dissertation supervision meetings until everyone breaks up for the summer. After the second week of June or so we're on our own, presumably to finish that dissertation while not abusing our livers too much. I don't know how everyone else's meetings have gone, but mine usually follow a cycle similar to that of the workshop: A few days of buoyancy and drafting, the handing in followed by a few days of utter lazyness because there's no point in doing new work if you're going to change it all in light of anticipated feedback, the meeting in which your spirits sink lower and lower as your supervisor points out everything that's wrong with your piece, a day or two of despondency as you wonder if you're really cut out for this, then the intrepid return to the blue-soaked page to see if there's anything salvageable. In my case, the greatest relief is that the finished piece is only allowed to be 15k words, and is not expected to have a completed narrative arc but rather be the three chapter pitch for a novel; I keep thinking about it in relation to my 90k word undergrad dissertation and then try not to laugh when we're given generalized advice about pacing ourselves and not getting overwhelmed by the word-count.

There are also weekly seminars on research methodologies, which we are regularly reminded are mandatory but for which no one ever takes attendance, which have consisted so far of powerpoints with blocks of text and no pictures, professors reading aloud from their own blogs, and random anecdotes, so as the weeks have progressed it's become much easier to find a seat.

After the research seminars we are allowed to catch up with each other for an hour before getting to meet assorted agents and publishers out of their native habitats, where they answer questions and give general advice. Then we get to chat with them while consuming free wine, hopefully getting loose enough in the process to pitch our half-finished books. We all seem to agree that the agent bit is the best bit so far, as they are generally helpful and friendly, and when they aren't we have free wine and each other.

Also, it looks like I'll still be around next year: I've been offered a place on the PhD, and since I don't have a share in all that student debt that everyone else in my generation is suffering under, I've taken them up on it. It feels less like having been accepted and more like being engulfed, as if I were a food source for amoebae, but I'll take my research opportunities no matter how they are offered. Though the next STEM student who says that of course I've been given funding because everyone gets funding no matter how insignificant their possible conclusions will be throttled.

Containing some questionable terms

While Ali Smith was at UEA this year I had the chance to ask her about what she thought of our responsibility to living people, whether she ever pulls her punches because of the people involved in her stories, and if she thinks that we should refrain from telling certain stories because they involve people we know, flesh-and-blood people, that may have some objection to seeing themselves reflected in paper – or on a screen, as is becoming more common.

She said, essentially, that we can’t – that we have a responsibility to the work to let it happen as it will, without self-censorship. Not that it always will. Some people (Joyce Carol Oates may have been mentioned) seem able to write fearlessly about personal experiences, personal relationships, so that it is quite impossible to imagine them sitting at their desk in their fuzzy bunny slippers (or at a moonlit window with fountain pen in hand) having hacked out a line or a page that cuts so close to the bone, that so starkly reflects a face they know with all of its warts, that they feel compelled to hold down the backspace until it disappears in favor of the clean white page.

A friend in my cohort linked us all to a page that admonished us each to ‘write like a motherfucker,’ which sounded like sound advice, except I wasn’t entirely sure how a motherfucker should write. Did that mean to write quickly, or intensely, or to smash my instrument in public after I was finished? Did it mean to shock, or to meditate, or to get blind drunk and invent a fairy language? Did it mean to transcend gender? 

About the same time, I was reading Stacey Richter’s Twin Study, and came to a point where one of her characters describes a group of cavemen as ‘motherfuckers.’ His girlfriend responds by saying yes, they probably are motherfuckers, in the literal sense, because they have no taboos, and that is what makes them abhorrent to him.

So, the takeaway is, write like you have no taboos. Go for the dark place, the tight place, the place that would make your best friend wince and say, “I do not talk like that and I don’t drink that much.” Go to the place that you can’t talk about but can’t stop thinking about, that might make your family upset and your friends upset and your grandmother worried, not for the sake of upsetting them but because it’s true. Write what you can’t ignore.

This is probably some of the hardest advice for me to take personally, because I’m still a tad worried about my family’s opinion. When my parents read the first story I wrote to win an award, (and, coincidentally, the first story of mine that they’d read in a decade) they found themselves everywhere in it. More recently, (last month) my Aunt found something that I’d written and wanted to know why I was so angry with my dad that I would make a character kill her father. A lot of the things that I haven’t written go closer to the bone, to places I don’t want anyone I’m related to connecting random dots and seeing proof of illuminati intervention, but those tend to be the places my mind wanders most often on its own, the places I know too well and really ought to write from.

If it all turns out too sordid, too personal, too real, there is plenty of space for taboos in the revision process.

Workshop Bingo

Yesterday was the last workshop of the MA, for the full time students, at least. Which felt strange, since it seems like we haven't been at it for very long, but at the same time welcome, because I've been in workshops for seven solid years now and at some point you get really tired of the process. Cava was bought and poured around, which led to the decision that everyone should drink at the mention of Point of View, because Henry reliably picks on P.o.V in every piece we read or discuss.

Which, of course, reminded me of my undergraduate workshops.

There seems to be a bit of a tradition at old R(MW)C involving English majors, their senior year, and large, opaque water bottles, specifically in relation to Senior Seminar. You can take a drink whenever the lecturer says something you think is moronic, or you can choose cue words that your classmates use frequently; in my case it was 'Jane Eyre,' 'A. S. Byatt,' 'Boy Band,' and any assignment that didn't apply to the ten Creative Writing concentrators in the room because the seminar was geared to Lit majors, of which we had one in the class, and so calculated to make the rest of us rend our garments in frustration. It was a three-hour study in frustration every Thursday night, when I was supposed to be fencing but was instead discussing critical approaches and research habits for a theoretical project that I would never actually conduct because it wasn't pertinent to my concentration. You would have drunk, too.

I'll blame Honors for causing that bit of fun to spill over into other things. Mandatory departmental readings? We all sat in a row, chose a key word based on the author's interests, and had ourselves a good old time. Except for the evening we chose 'um,' because none of us knew the visiting writer's work. You'd think that professional word people would have excised that bit of filler from their vocabularies when they were toddlers, but the introduction alone contained enough 'um's to drain half the volume of my Nalgene.

But the best place to play the game was Workshop. Workshops are tough when you're first starting out and don't really know what you're doing. They're tough in a different way when you're months away from graduating and are surrounded by students that are still figuring out plot arcs and grammatical sentences. My response was to toss about six shots of vodka (I'm not really sure, I free poured that shit in proportion to the pain I'd felt while reading the pieces earlier that week), filled it up the rest of the way with Mountain Dew from the dining hall on the way to class, gave it a shake, and started sipping. One gulp every time someone I knew was written into a sex scene. Every time boy bands were mentioned. Twice for metaphysical bullshit. And a nice long chug whenever the professor drastically misinterpreted my work or when one of the other students correctly explained the entire piece to him. There were other cues, but they varied from week to week. It was a good way to curb my temper: the more reasons I had to be annoyed, the warmer and fuzzier I felt. When the session was promising to be really bad, other people joined me, or borrowed my water bottle in the middle of class.

Which leads to a bit of confusion I think needs to exist, but is too specialized to be mass-produced.

We heard 'point of view' in every workshop. In undergrad it was some variation on 'metaphysical bullshit.' And everyone contributing to the workshop has a handful of private buzzwords that get whipped out every week. 'The writing is very assured.' 'Tropes.' 'It reminds me of Z. Z. Packer/Ali Smith/Raymond Carver/whoever you choose.' 'Structure.' 'You should read...' There are words and phrases that come up over and over again, not so much because the concepts recur in peoples' writing, but that the participants have pet ideas that get trotted out every week.

Bingo cards.

They'd be different for every workshop group, and would have probably made me pay more attention than my drinking game. Of course, anyone that won would have to scream 'Bingo!' in the middle of workshops. But most workshops could stand to be a little more surreal. Someone out there has to do this. If I never get the chance to do it myself, I'll find a baby MA to corrupt (if I'm still around next year) and revel in second-hand shenanigans.

Brain fluff and an anthology.

This time there is a trifecta of reasons for my absence: a hellish journey to France for an international fencing tournament (no legionnaire's disease this time), one of those long illnesses that lays you out flat for weeks, and a directive from Ali Smith to go write a novel and the accompanying discovery that when I begin a novel everything else ceases to be important - a trick of psychology or a flaw of personality that Henry assures me is pretty common.

February is over, but it still feels like February. The return of marked coursework resulted in loud dissent in the ranks, for assorted reasons. My personal annoyance stems not from my marks but from the conflicting commentary attached by the markers, which makes me wonder if anyone really knows what they're doing when it comes to the rough side of fiction. There seems to be a great element of chance in producing a piece that 'works,' and even more chance in getting it published. Or perhaps that is just what I tell myself to lessen the sting of rejection letters.

Speaking of publication, Cruentus Libri press will be birthing a horror anthology next week selected around the unifying theme of the sea; The Dead Sea will be on Amazon US, UK, for Kindle and on Create Space. My contribution to the collection was one of those instances of incredible chance and the vatic voice; it was written in one breath (after an extended debate with my partner on the monsters of Celtic mythology), came out exactly as I wanted it to, and found a home immediately. Which is not typical of my writing or publishing process.

Doesn't that just look precious?

Two more anthologies should be poking their sunny heads through the snow along side the daffodils this spring, though if the present trend continues they will be excessively delayed. By the time the last comes out I hope to have found an agent for some longer pieces that have been sitting in the closet for a while, or at least have enough rejection letters piled up to show that I've tried.