A Multitude of Faults in Alaska

Lately a lot of people I know have told me that I have to read The Fault in our Stars, including people that I don't usually talk books with. In fact, it's mostly been people that I've never talked books with. The last time that happened was a few years back, when Twilight came out - which I never got around to reading because I was a fresher in undergrad. This time things are a little different.

I read Looking for Alaska when I was in high school, and I remember being squicked out by the dynamic of the oral sex scene between Lara and Miles, followed closely by being irritated by the male character's lack of reciprocity and the female character's lack of dimensionality. There were other things that bothered me about the book, including the incident with the stolen Breathalyzer and why that was important or proved anything, but it was a first book. With A Multitude of Katherines I realised that the main character was reducing all of his girlfriends to equations, threw the book across the room, and decided to never read John Green again, because there were too many good books out there for me to waste my time on ones that were so half-baked.

And the years rolled on, and YA boomed while I had my back turned, and now everyone I know insists that he has produced a masterpiece, and I'm a bit sceptical as to whether the author who squicked out pre-ideals 16 year old me is capable of producing a masterpiece. But then, in the past ten years I managed to gain the education and vocabulary to explain what about his debut novel bothered me, so it is not inconceivable that he has also improved with time. So at first I thought that I'd go back and re-read all of Green's books, just so I could explain coherently why I don't like his work when people gush at me about the latest instalment. 

But then I had an idea.

My first degree is in analysing books, essentially. And it's been a long time since I've had the chance to compare or contrast two texts. And it's been a long time since I've had the chance to read some Young Adult fiction. And the overlap between people who I've heard mock Twilight and the people who are telling me to read Stars now is substantial. 

So, as soon as I can hunt up used copies of both of them, I think I'm going to do a comparative reading of The Fault in our Stars and Twilight, concentrating on the things in Green's early work that bothered me when I was younger. Off the top of my head (and ten years on) that would include the complexity and agency of female characters, the consistency of tone, the logic of the plot and the world, and the overall shape and pacing of the novel.

And since there's no where else for me to put it, whatever I come up with will probably wind up showing up here.

Upgrade, brain fluff, and proselytizers

At my last supervision, Henry said: "Screw it, stop worrying and just hand it all in." And so I have handed in my documents for the upgrade, all seventy pages of them, and it suddenly feels like I'm on holiday. They probably could have stood a bit more revision, but I have gotten to the 'just don't care' point.

And now there is nothing standing between me and drafting the novel. Which is not going as well as it could be. At least there's death. And sensuality. In fact, so far the thing consists of nothing but death and sex interspersed with Bible quotes, which as a book also has a good amount of death and sex in it.

Which brings me around to Jehovah's Witnesses, and things I haven't said.

A lovely pair of older women came around last week while I was revising and asked me if I thought the dead could live again, and since religious groups are Pertinent To My Interests, we wound up chatting happily on the doorstep for quite a while. I truly enjoyed hearing about their experiences with the church, and how it could improve my life, but when they told me that the Bible contains the blueprint for having a happy family, I bit my tongue.

There is one thing about the PhD novel that is completely autobiographical: I learned to read at my parents kitchen table with a large print NIV bible. We went through the whole thing several times, one Old Testament chapter, one New Testament chapter, a Psalm, and a Proverb every day - we may have skipped the prophets a bit. The book is many things, but full of happy families is not one of them. It could justifiably be called a compendium of models of screwed up families. Absalom and Tamar. David and Bathsheba. Lot and his daughters. The best Happy Family principle in the whole book may be, "do not divorce your betrothed for being knocked up by the Divine," and even that required angelic intervention to bring about. 

So now I'm hoping that they'll come back, so that I can ask them how exactly their logic runs. Or I may just write my own list of Bible-based principles for a happy family. The first one would probably be, "If you capture a woman in battle, let her mourn for her dead countrymen for a month before taking her as your concubine; there's nothing worse than when your girl starts crying every time you kiss her."

There is one definite plus to the novel - it's given me reason to look up lots of questionable things. Like when the words 'condom' and 'cocksucker' came into common usage, the etomology of slang terms for homosexuality (thank you, OED), when the Pill became widley available, and what a 20 year old female student of journalism might have used to research marital relations in preparation for her wedding in 1973 when her mother wasn't on speaking terms with her because of said wedding. Heaven help anyone that glances at my browser history. 

Conversation with my supervisor

H: "The voice is working, but the novel so far shies away from intimacy."

S: "So I need more...intimacy?"

H: "Exactly."

S: "Does that mean that I should write a scene where they have sex?"

H: "Not exactly."

S: "But sex would fix the intimacy problem, wouldn't it?"

H: "Well, that's one way to fix it."

S: "They're both from incredibly repressed backgrounds; if they have sex they'd probably die from guilt."

H: "Still. Intimacy."

S: "Right. I'll think about it."


~Later that day, while meeting with the other degree candidates~

A: "What are you doing tonight?"
S: "Drinking whisky and writing sex for Henry."
A: "...That sounds wrong on so many levels."

Big secret: Everyone's already had the Big Serious Earth-shattering conversations, and I'm probably not going to revolutionize the novel through my supervision discussions. But they certainly make me do things I wouldn't do otherwise.

In other news, my critical supervisor suddenly adores the three thesis chapters I've given her, and I submit for my upgrade in a few weeks. So, yay return of sanity, however fleetingly you may grace me with your divine presence!

A shed of one's own

About six months ago, David bought a house. And behind that house was a garden, and in that garden was a shed. And I said, "dibs!"

Also pictured: the swing-set abandoned by the previous owner. And the pond. And a bottle of slug killer. And a million spiders.

This past weekend the spiders were energetically evicted, a school desk was acquired from the British Heart Foundation, and Dave breathed a relieved sigh for his unvarnished teak dining room table, which I had previously colonized and may have scratched just a little bit.

The chocolate is vital to the process. Trust me.

My upgrade panel has been slated for the 26th of June, which means I need to hand in all of the material on the 5th of June if I want my examiners to not hate me, which means that I should have started panicking yesterday. The fiction is nearly finished, but my critical supervisor thinks that the two paragraphs at the end of the thesis sample, where I sketchily describe the research I haven't been able to finish, are the best part and that I need to develop them into the bulk of the submission. Which seems to be a standard supervisor response. So I'm under house arrest and wishing books had a Ctrl+F option until I turn out a draft she likes or I lose my mind and run away from home, whichever comes first.

I'm sensing a trend...

Last night I was going to go to bed early, because allergies are evil. But after thirty minutes or so of cycling a paragraph I'd just read on the 1980s textbooks lawsuits through my head I got back up for juuuust one minute to try and find the books they were referencing one more time. 

A lot of what I'm doing right now involves literature textbooks that were in use from 1973 to the mid 1990s. They're easier to find than I thought they would be, because people will try and make a buck off of anything on the internet and the 70s aren't that long ago, but they're also harder to find than I expected, because the publishers got really funky when they titled their books and the sellers don't follow a set way of listing them, and the 70s were about 40 years ago and who saves textbooks that long? (The books on my desk are from the Adventures in Reading series; it took a considerable amount of looking to figure out that Adventures in Reading is for ninth grade, while Adventures in Appreciation is for tenth, and that the Heritage edition is from 1980 and has different content from the Pegasus edition, which is from 1989. And that the Pegasus edition existed at all, because for some reason almost no one wanted to sell me that edition of the book.)

So I just-one-minuted myself to 1 AM, but I figured out the publisher's material structure and titling scheme, and found the books, and ordered the books, and am now waiting for the books to drop through my mail slot so I can find out if I really did figure out the titling scheme or if they were all mislisted. 

Which is exactly what happened the last time I had a breakthrough and found Adventures in Reading.

All of my massive leaps of progress happen at 1 AM.

Why do I even try and get work done during the day?

A home for "Target Practice"

I'm a bit tardy with this, as the e-mail came the day I packed up to go to America last-minute, but the first chapter of The Shore, in which Chloe appears and which I have been trying to home appropriately for a while, has been published in issue 5 of The Fog Horn Magazine.

I'm particularly happy about this, as the editors did not ask me to change the ending to be 'a little bit nicer', which has made me turn down offers of magazine publication before; many thanks are due to Lucy Luck (agent extraordinaire) for brokering the arrangement. Also, The Fog Horn has a relatively low subscription cost - it works out to $1 per published story, and gets you free access to all of the back issues. 5% of their proceeds go to 826LA, a non-profit that supports young students in developing creative and critical writing skills. As a student that's never been able to justify the subscription cost of one of the big literary magazines and has in the past gotten quite creative about funding her education, this is too much happy for words.

(Props to the Randolph College Writing Lab, which left copies of The Sun, OneStory, and similar lying about for the consumption of the great unwashed. Also, I suppose, thanks to the rich students of that institution who indiscriminately abandoned designer goods and electronics on move-out day and funded my return to the UK for the Masters degree.)

Also, another happy thing that effects literally no one outside my program: I've been given funding for the rest of my degree, provided I finish the degree by the end of 2016. They don't publicize how many funded places are on offer, but the general consensus is that there are not many; I know exactly one person in the cohort that is funded, and we're a gossipy species. The Hub is pretty lax about sending out notices that all of the funding has been dispensed and that hopefuls can stop hyperventilating every time a new message pings in their inbox, so I may be casually avoiding department social events until the tension dies down. Just because no one talks about researchers being assassinated for their funding doesn't mean it doesn't happen.

Walk to the moon

This spring the uni hosted, among other luminaries, Margaret Atwood and Eleanor Catton. And somehow I managed to hear both of them speak from quite close up. And though that was in itself a wonderful thing, my biggest takeaway was not from what they said, specifically, about writing, but who they are as writers.

Craft books go on at length about subverting expectations, but Margaret Atwood did so in the flesh. She led the conversation places that the interviewer obviously had no idea they would go. She brought a rag doll a fan had silkscreened her face onto, to answer the questions that she as a writer did not want to answer. She sang a hymn from Year of the Flood. We had, through the course of the Literary Festival, become accustomed to hearing Writers speak, each time with all the dignity and gravitas of the capital W, but she did not perform to our expectations. She was unapologetically who she had decided to be, with the fire-hardened edge of a person that has probably discovered through experience that this is simply the only way to be.

I want to be Margaret Atwood when I grow up because I adore the complexity and skill of her writing, and I feel a biographical familiarity with her wilderness upbringing and hope that I can also turn the feral aspects of my nature to good use.

Eleanor Catton I want to be for different reasons. She has gone down in record as being the youngest person to win the Booker, the first New Zealander to win the Booker, and the author of the longest book to win the Booker. Which, in light of the prize being opened to Americans the year that she won the Booker, sounds surprisingly like a gauntlet bouncing across a stone floor to me. Hopefully when I turn twenty-eight and some other American is the first American to win the Booker my dangerously competitive streak will bed itself down until needed.

It seems, when you look at it, an impossible thing, the position she is in now. But there is, as there is to everything, a logical progression of events.

In conversation during the Literary Festival, Eleanor Catton explained how she had gotten where she has gotten. She had no television as a child, so she spent her time reading long Victorian novels. Her parents encouraged this, and she got into University. She did well in University, so she did a Masters. The Masters required her to write a book, so she wrote a book. Having written a book, she had a book to sell, and, being in New Zealand's tiny literary market, she was able to sell it directly to a local publisher. Because she was published in New Zealand, an English agent who loves Kiwi fiction found her book, signed her on, and sold her in the rest of the world. Because she had a successful book, she was accepted into the Iowa Writer's workshop. Because she was in the Iowa Writer's workshop she had the space and the tools to begin writing the book that would win the Booker. Yes, massive amounts of discipline, skill, and hard work were also involved, but the point is that she didn't go from being a teenager reading three-volume novels to touring the world talking about The Luminaries in a single step. There were many steps, and when they occurred they were logical steps, not to the ultimate outcome but in a general direction. So what I learned from Eleanor Catton is that, with enough small, logical steps, you can walk to the moon.