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.
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