I aten't dead...

...just incredibly burnt out from the PhD and the consequences of completely neglecting my health during it. 

In my case 'burnt out' means 'wanting to do nothing but chew through books, hoarding information like a library-dwelling goblin.' Which is very fortunate, since I'm one of the Eccles Centre's writers at the British Library this year, and information-hoarding is exactly what I need to be doing. The project I'm working on is about the American Eugenics movement and involuntary sterilisation in the 20th century which, while being incredibly interesting from an information-hoarding goblin viewpoint, regularly leaves me speechless with grief. Every time I think I've found the nadir of human nature, it up and surprises me.

Given the gravity of the topics I'm exploring, I'm hesitant to write about them casually. The words will come in their own time, and until they do I'm content to just bear witness.

Sevens

Every seven years, or so I've been told, the body renews itself. Of course, this is technically a myth. Your stomach lining renews itself every five days, while the lenses of your eyes and enamel of your teeth are with you from before birth. But in the main, if you dismiss the outliers, the body in which you now live, and move, and have your being is not the same one in which you lived seven years ago, not exactly.

The idea might stick around so easily because it chimes with the idea of the climacterics, the turning points in a life. The first comes in the seventh year; the rest are all multiples of seven. Unless they're multiples of nine; as with cells, not everyone agrees on the distance between turning points. Regardless of their frequency, a climacteric marks a dramatic change from one type of life, from one approach to life, to another, or so Plato and Cicero and Boethius all believed. The body you move around in is not the same body you moved around in seven years ago, and neither is the life through which that body moves.

Seven years ago I was living on the Eastern Shore, working in a wine shop and trying to write a book that would eventually become The Shore. I'd spent the previous school year in England and already knew I had to go back. We had no internet, no phone, so once a week I collected fat airmail envelopes from the post office, read the letters and responded to them in instalments. David had never written letters before. His handwriting looked a bit like you'd expect from a doctor with serial killer tendencies, or a serial killer with medical aspirations.  Some weeks they were the only human contact I had.

Some things are the same. That summer I searched the hedges for wild raspberries, lay on the dock and dipped crabs out of the creeks, paddled out into the marshes to pick mussels and picked up the potatoes left in the corners of the fields after harvest. Now I drag Dave out to scavenge blackberries from the hedgerows, hunt damsons, make wine. Back then I couldn't imagine the life I have now, the same way I can't now imagine going back to America. I miss the Shore, and I miss my family, but I don't know how I'd even begin making a life there.

That summer, I wasn't sure I'd finish my degree. Since then, I've finished two more. I wasn't sure I'd finish the book. I wasn't sure, when I'd been alone with the marsh and my own thoughts for weeks at a time, whether I would ever regain the ability to step into the human world, to speak aloud when I wanted to be spilling the words in ink, because you only get so many words in a day and why waste them on the air when you can fix them to the page?

It could be that it's the blackberries that makes me think about that time. Summer is its own universe. They link together, so that when I stand in a pool of sun in my garden in England I can close my eyes and feel the Virginia sun, be seven years old, or fourteen, or twenty-one. Writing has a similar property: when you're sunk beneath the surface of a work, slowly letting it drown you while you tinker with its moving parts, it's like every other time you've been under, like you've never left that word-sea.

Or maybe it's just the sevens: I have both a new body and a new life, both different from their previous iterations in major ways and yet possessed of a few comforting similarities. New body, new life, but doing the exact same thing I was doing seven years ago.

Of course, this all begs the question: what will I be doing seven years from now?

Notes in no specific order

1) Following graduation there is generally a period of internal disturbance during which the subject mopes, wonders what they've done with the last three (five, seven, twelve) years of their life, wonders what the point of life is at all, and generally does nothing useful. The length of this mope generally correlates to how pressing it is that they find a job. If they already have a job, the mope may continue indefinitely. If they are self-employed, the mope may be synchronous with the bare minimum of work.

B) If writing is a burrow (to borrow Margaret Atwood's description) then revision is an oubliette. A burrow can imaginably be made to be comfortable and homey; the point of an oubliette is to be as unpleasant as it is impossible to get out of. In Beatrix Potter guests are frequently hosted to tea in burrows. The nicest thing that's ever happened in an oubliette, as far as I know, is Jennifer Connelly getting out of one.

III) 50% of revision is trying to move plot points which are contingent on historical events without causing an anachronism. Another 50% is being cranky about it. 

Still another 50% is coming to hate the work enough that you're willing to delete anything, because that's the state that is required by an effective revision. 

Դ) Every book I've read and class I've been in (and taught) has emphasised the fact that the worst thing a body can do to a piece of writing is start polishing up the sentences too early; work has to stay in a semi-fluid state, where everything is up for debate, until there's a clear idea of what final shape it will settle into. Unfortunately, bringing an extract to a supervisor once a month meant that everything I've written since 2013 had to be pretty immediately polished up. Which means that I have to go back and crack the gloss so that parts can be moved around and a working shape can be made. 

At least I've learned one way not to write a novel, and so will be saved ever using it again.

⠑) Revision is finally less depressing than keeping abreast of world events, and this book is pretty grim in places.

䷇) The fact checking list includes: Brown v. Board of Education, 1980s moral panics, Eloquentia Perfecta, Eucharistic Discipline, Women's Rights, the Pro-Life Movement, Georgetown University's student newspaper, Watergate, the oil embargo, and the etymology of the word 'dork'. 

...---...) It could be worse. I could be doing my taxes.

American Publication Day (was yesterday)!

Yesterday, The Lauras was released in the United States. It looks like this:

If I had favourite covers, this would probably be it.

Normally, publication day makes me anxious. Abnormally, my brother and his wife are visiting, and by the time we got to the part of yesterday by which I had finally woken up and was able to form coherent thoughts we'd already begun mixing drinks and talking about existential terror and our absent siblings' bad life decisions, so I never quite got around to remembering until the time for anxiety had passed. It was both celebratory (despite my forgetting there was something to celebrate) and less reminiscent of than a reprise of how we spent high school.

Luckily, other people remembered what day it was, and other people have been reading the book in the lead up. Kirkus and The New York Journal of Books both reviewed it ahead of time, and Bookriot has included it in the month's must-read new releases. There are other reviews in other places, and probably many that I've forgotten about or just missed. To my great joy, most of the reviewers seem to have 'got' Alex, and that was the biggest thing I'd crossed my fingers for. With any luck, the rest of the American reading public will also.

Last minute hustle

At the end of my viva I was told to sit tight until official notice came through telling me what to do next, and since the uni website said that all I had to do to graduate this summer was make the July 7th pass list, I figured sitting tight was what I'd do. Except sitting tight goes against my nature, and since I happened to be up in Norwich a few weeks ago I figured it wouldn't hurt to drop by the postgrad office and ask them when they thought my marching orders would be appearing. And it was a good thing I did, because the nice lady in the office told me that the deadline for submitting the final copy was actually the 12th of June, or two working days and a weekend from right then, but they were processing forms as fast as they could and with any luck I'd have the letter telling me what to do in time to actually do something about it.

The rub in all that lay in the fact that, while my examiners had told me exactly what changes they wanted me to make to the thesis - delete two sentences, reword a third sentence, and clean up the typos - they hadn't told me definitively if those were gentleman's agreement type corrections, or if they'd be putting them in the official writeup. The difference being that in the first instance I could go ahead and turn in the draft that I'd already corrected, while in the second instance someone would have to sign off on the fact that I'd done the corrections, adding a week or two to the process and putting me well past the hand-in date.

I hate gambling, but in the final analysis it seemed smarter to bet on the letter saying 'pass with no corrections.' At which point I found that the official binder of UEA theses needs a five-day run-up at this time of year. Which meant that I had to find someone else who could bind it overnight and get it to me in time for me to get it to the University before the deadline, still assuming that in all this the paperwork would be processed and I'd be allowed to submit it. Which meant that, rather than handing a pdf of the thesis to someone who knew how UEA likes theirs bound, I got to find someone in Leeds who could do it in a hurry, then weed through several versions of the University regulations trying to figure out exactly in which direction they wanted the spine lettering printed.

Digression: why is it that every time I've had to submit something that adheres to strict specifications - at university, to the border agency, to the taxman - those specifications are so imprecisely worded that, with the best will in the world, I always send in my work with no clue as to whether it actually meets the guidelines? The uni guidelines stated that the bound copy had to have the name of the degree for which it was submitted on the cover, but didn't say whether that meant 'PhD,' 'Doctor of Philosophy,' or 'Doctor of Philosophy in Creative and Critical Writing;' there were points in the documents where that phrase referred to all three terms.

On Friday the 9th I received the bound thesis: it was as black as my mood and the perfect density for bludgeoning. Much later on Friday (about six hours too late to phone up a printer if I'd waited for the official go-ahead) I received the letter that told me that I had passed without corrections, and all I had to do was turn in the bound copy that I fortuitously had. On Sunday  I went trudging back up to Norwich, because I've had the trains cancelled on me too often to trust them to be running on a day when I absolutely had to make it through. And on Monday I trudged from where I was staying in town to the Elizabeth Fry building to hand the damn thing over. At which point I found that the office where I was supposed to submit the thing was closed and locked for a school holiday.

Because of course the office is closed on the deadline that determines whether a person makes this year's graduation.

The panicking only lasted as long as it took me to find the staff member chilling in a meeting room two floors down on the off chance that someone wanted to bring in a thesis that day. Since she didn't pull out callipers to check the formatting I figured that any minor misreadings of the guidelines would be allowed to squeak by. But she also didn't give me a receipt, or any guarantee that someone else wouldn't catch an error and I'd have to do it over again. So it wasn't until I got another letter, the one that says, "the following candidate has satisfied the examiners for the award of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy" with my name after it, that I stopped worrying.

So it looks like I'm really finished this time. And it looks like I'll be graduating next month.

And, for the life of me, I don't know how to feel about either of those things.

It is finished

Last Thursday was my viva. About ten days before last Thursday I wound up in A&E at four in the morning where a very nice doctor told me that my stomach was staging a coup and I should give up caffeine and stress, which is exactly what a person with a crippling caffeine addiction wants to hear ten days before the meeting that passes judgement on the previous four years of their life. Real life can be the biggest hack.

Part of the stress came from having two people whose work I immensely enjoy and respect as examiners. It's usually a mistake to meet your heroes, but passing up the chance to have them read my work just because I was afraid they would prove mortal seemed silly, or at least it did last summer when I was filling in the paperwork. On the train up to Norwich I was pretty certain that they'd tell me to rewrite the entire thing - and on some level I wished that they would tell me to rewrite the entire thing, as coming back to it after three months made all the flaws painfully clear. 

I may have spent the hour before the actual viva sitting in a remote corner of the university campus quietly singing rounds, because singing is the best way to keep yourself from hyperventilating, keeling over, and missing whatever it is that's got you nervous. Or so I've been told.

When I turned up at the internal examiner's office door on Thursday afternoon they seemed positively friendly. 

And then they told me that I'd passed.

And then they told me that, more than finding the thing adequate, they'd actually enjoyed it.

And then it turned into a really interesting conversation about free speech and culture and religion and the limits of legal action and the capacity of fiction to address those things that can't be quantified but which nevertheless influence the tide of history. Philosophy and theory didn't even get a look-in, and no one asked about the books that I hadn't read. 

They didn't really give me corrections - two sentences to delete and some stray typos to correct - so I suppose the next thing to do is get the final, bound version to the university with all of its accompanying paperwork in time to be included on the next pass list, so I can graduate this summer with all of the people I know and like. And I suppose I should start looking for academic posts of a shape that I could fit myself to. And I should probably start thinking about writing another novel. And  now that the thesis is done it needs to be broken down into journal articles, or else built up into a monograph, so it can do someone else some good. And maybe one of these days I'll actually unpack.

But right now my brain is mush, and I've forgotten how to talk. So I'll probably work on peace negotiations with my stomach, and leave everything else 'til next week.

Staring down the viva

On Monday Belief finally got to the point that someone else could read it without me immediately dying of shame. So I sent it off to Lucy, only six months later than I originally intended to. It isn't a short book, and it certainly isn't a tidy book just yet, so there's no point eating my fingernails while watching my inbox for guidance on how to make it a tidy book. Which means there's nothing keeping me from prepping for my viva. And since I originally created this blog as a record of my stumblings through higher education, the whole thing would lack symmetry if I didn't record how I'm going to be doing that.

First off, 'viva' is short for 'viva voce,' which in this context is taken to mean 'defending with the living voice.' In the English system the doctoral candidate is usually orally examined on the thesis, and the examination is a factor in whether the candidate passes. In the case of UEA, the examination is performed by one member of the university, and one member from an external university, whose work is related to the subject of the thesis. I've been more than a little annoyed with my fellow Americans in the past couple of months because they can't seem to wrap their minds around this; they think the whole thing is a formality and the hard work was over when I handed in.

As far as prepping for the viva is concerned, the first thing I did was panic, because that's seemingly the first thing everyone does, and because everyone I asked who had already done it told me that the best prep was to pray, bargain, cry, and eat chocolate, which is realistic but not very helpful. The second thing I did was google around to see how people I don't know prepped for theirs, which was marginally more helpful.

The advice I found broke down into two basic categories: know your opponent, and know yourself. A bunch of them are common sense, but when you're panicking even common sense seems like black magic.

1) Hunt up the university's Examiner Report forms, and their guidelines for examiners. They'll outline exactly what constitutes a pass, a pass with corrections, a rewrite, a fail, and any other outcomes the school considers possible. That will let you skew your responses to questions so that they demonstrate your achievement of the benchmarks.

2) Find and read the examiners' work. Get a sense of what they are preoccupied with, what their views might be on your material, and how they build your arguments. In my case, discover that the external has written critical essays on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and immediately fangirl to hell and back.

3) Find out what's been published in your field since you stopped gathering material. In the same vein, make a list of what you left out of the thesis, or the literature review, and be able to defend why.

4) Put together a list of sample questions that might be asked, and start thinking about how you might answer them. There are scads of sample questions out there, all you need to do is Google. Which sounds dirty, out of context.

5) Review the actual thesis. Read the whole thing again. Put in flags to mark where chapter and section breaks are so you don't have to shuffle too much finding them. Highlight important quotes. Make a list of typos as you go through so that you can get right on to correcting them after the viva is over, and so you can strategically bring it out if typos come up in the meeting to let the examiners know that you're on top of them. Write a one-page summary of each chapter of the thesis. Look up how to pronounce words that you're not sure of, or the names of authors whose work you reference.

6) Consider what you're willing to defend to the death, and what's up for compromise. This is probably more dependant on what discipline you're in, and how subjective the work is.

7) Write down the questions that you want to ask the examiners, so you don't forget them on the day.

8) Figure out the practical concerns, such as how you're going to get there on the day.

And that seems to be all that one can realistically do. So I'm going to go off and do it.

And I'm going to eat chocolate while I'm doing it.

Notes from limbo

It's about two months until my viva, and I seem to be recovering some of the brain cells that were sacrificed to finish writing the thesis. I've also started recovering the draft of Belief that I lost, or rather piecing together a new draft from what I've still got, and since a good chunk of that is in the thesis I've had more than one horrible moment of realising that what I've handed in contains some Glaring Mistakes.

One of the major contributors to the returning brain cells is the three weeks spent in Australia over last month, first for Adelaide Writers' Week and then for some independent exploring, because spending 35 hours travelling only to turn around and come home when the work is finished is really hard to contemplate when you don't have anything seriously pressing to come home to, and because it took me most of our time in Adelaide to get over the trauma of that much time spent in a metal tube in the forcible company of people.

Writers' Week was amazing on several levels: the organisers were both inhumanly organised and superhumanly lovely, the speakers were the stuff of fantasy, and the audience members were genuinely lovely, both during the events and in casual conversation afterwards. Dave and I had the privilege of turning up before it all began and sticking around until it all ended, and we spent an agonised morning trying to figure out how many events we could afford to go to before we were told that they were all free, at which point we decided to go to all of them. And now my stack of books to read has grown exponentially, and my list of people that I'd quite like to have a drink with if ever they're in the area has expanded proportionately.

And a little bit of happy news: The Lauras has been shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature's Encore Award. 

Dazed and confused

In the last few days of working on the thesis I went looking through my computer for the master copy of Belief so that I could check a timeline issue, and made the unpleasant discovery that the master copy, thanks to a hiccough in my operating system, no longer existed. Since it was the last few days of working on the thesis I screamed for a little bit and went back to working on the thesis, but after the thesis was done I went around to the computer-type people I know to confirm that, yes, the file had been eaten and, while I still had sections of the novel littering my hard drive that could be pulled together to make up what I'd lost, minus a round or two of revision, there was no way of recovering the actual document that had been lost.

Considering this is the fourth time that such a thing has happened with this novel alone it should no longer surprise anyone that I draft on paper. I'm not sure if this happens to be an especially ill-fated novel, or if I'm having worse luck than usual with electronics. Either way, it's not as much of a total disaster as it could be. Depending on the time of day it's slightly less annoying than the fact that, since moving, I can find none of my socks or sweaters. Though that could be due to still being stuck in the brain-fog that seemed to descend the moment I handed in, which has made everything from spelling to tying my shoes pretty well impossible. The one thing that I haven't been too foggy to do is transcribe, so the moment that I could look at the first draft without feeling sick I started transcribing it. And this afternoon I finished it. Maybe tomorrow my head will be clear enough to start putting what I have in order again.

Hand in

I've fallen down the rabbit hole of final round editing. Everything that could possibly considered a verifiable fact has been double-checked. Every word that might possibly need to be capitalised has been looked up. The spelling of words that I could spell when I was seven (that's a lie, I've never been able to spell) has been checked in multiple dictionaries. All the little things that I was going to take care of later have finally been taken care of. It's been printed, and then bits of it were re-printed because I discovered that I'd leaned on a corner of the keyboard between copies and my Contents page had sprung a rash that looked like QQQ~Q```q~~Q`. It was bound with minor trepidation on the part of myself and the help-desk librarian, because it required the biggest spine they had and didn't quite fit into the binding machine without being forced. And then it was left on the corner of my desk for a day while I chased my supervisor for signatures, because he needs to attest to the fact that it's my work and isn't in today.

And now it looks like this:

Chapstick for scale, because my owls are all packed.

One copy is for me to us for reference during the viva, the other two are going to be taken down to the PGR office in a few hours, I'm going to sign forms attesting all manner of things including the fact that it is my own work, and then it will be both practically and officially out of my hands. 

I'm not sure how I feel about this, though it is a verifiable fact that I haven't been able to sleep this week. It's also a verifiable fact that I've been letting a million things slip since about September that will now need to be aggressively gotten after, so I won't really have the time to dwell on anything. 

Oh, and I don't think I ever mentioned; the title of the bloody thing is We Don’t Need No Education: Belief, and the Expurgation of US Public School Literature Texts in Response to Activist Beliefs.

Submissions Open

Over the course of the year we spent organising last month's hybrid writing conference my professional web evolved in new and unforeseen directions, mostly because organising a conference puts you in touch with new and interesting people. And one of the things that's come out of getting in touch with all of those new people is that I'm now involved with a publishing venture.

Seam Editions seeks to provide a home, both online and in print, for writing that plays with the boundaries between creative writing and criticism. If that seems a bit open-ended, it's because we're hoping that people will send us work that surprises us, and that subverts traditional concepts of fiction, poetry, criticism, etc. in ways that we haven't thought of. There are a few more details on the submissions page, where you can also find the address to send work and queries. At the moment we're accepting unsolicited submissions, so if you have something that you think might fit, it never hurts to sling it our way. And if you don't write, or don't write this sort of work, feel free to come over and read - there's a little Christmas Present up on the website for the curious.

Zero to maudlin in no time at all

In fifteen days I'm (touch wood) going to drop one electronic and two physical copies of my thesis on the weird partition thing in the PGR office, sign some paperwork, and walk out of there a free agent. This should be anxious-making, given how far the thesis is from being ready to be born, but every time I start to try to worry about that I start getting wibbly over the fact that I've only got seventeen or so more days of living in Norwich.

Finishing the thesis seems reason enough to get wibbly, but true to form I've managed to muddle life up enough that several things change once I hand the work over. Finishing means finally moving in with that guy (what was his name?) that I married two and a half years ago. It means not staying in school like adults always told me to because I've finally run out of school to stay in. It means not being a dog of a university for the first time in nearly a decade. Changing the way my friendships work, now that I'm leaving behind the people that were always around and inserting myself into the lives of the people that I was always leaving behind. Putting to bed the late nights and unhealthy habits that got me through the last however many years. Saying goodbye to Norwich

Weirdly enough, the thought that seems to make me the most wibbly is that it means giving up the first apartment I lived in as a self-sufficient adult, even though the heating's all but gone and I hate being away from Dave (that was his name!) and the neighbours' music keeps me awake during the day because I don't need their help to not sleep at night. I felt the same way when I helped my little brother move his things out of his bedroom in our parents' house and into the place he now shares with his wife, the feeling of stepping from one room to the next and realising that you're not able to step back, that there's no 'back' to step into because the only place it exists any more is in your head.

Change is hard, even when it's good change. And even though there are many good things beginning because of what is ending - no more missing game nights and parties in Reading because I'll be at school, no more saying goodbye to Dave, no more busted heating and ridiculous deadlines and all the other things that make this unsustainable as a permanent lifestyle - I'm going to let myself be sad for just a little bit longer.

'Sad' isn't exactly the right word. 'Hiraeth' is probably better, only in part because it is one of Dave's words.  The place I've come to love, and the person I've become, are both so much more than I hoped they would be when I fetched up at the last station on the train route in 2012 with a coat too thin for the weather, not enough money to live on, and the niggling feeling that I wasn't good enough to be there. And neither becoming has been deliberate: Norwich has grown on me as I've grown into myself, haphazardly and often in a panic, with too much attention paid to what must be done for any to be given to what the effect might be of doing it. In a way I'm glad that I had no idea what would happen when I first got here, because even after having made the trip, I still don't understand how I got from there to here. That's the way I write books, I guess it makes sense it's the way I live life.

Of course, while letting oneself get wibbly as a chapter rustles to a close is in human nature, the close of a chapter tends to be where its most vital to fill each unforgiving minute with sixty seconds worth of distance run, to bastardise a phrase. And, despite the years that I've already put into it, the thesis could still benefit from a little more work.

I guess I can run a ways further.

I'm not dead yet!

...though I'm not exactly feeling better. The cough I picked up in America in October has stuck around to make life difficult, so the frequency of getting things done has halved, and the rate of not being able to care that I'm not getting things done seems to vacillate at will.

Fortunately, other things have been vacillating as well - there were difficulties hunting down an external examiner, so my hand-in date has shifted to January 20th, which happens to be my dad's birthday. Which means that I don't get to move home just yet, but at least I get another month to work on the thesis. No matter how finished it gets I'll always be able to spend one more month on it, but given the amount of time I've spent coughing instead of working this term the delay is something of a blessing.

The academic conference that's been in the works for the past year will finally come to pass on Saturday, and I've got everything crossed that it goes off without any major upsets. I'm not presenting, but running the thing is so much effort that I wish I were. But the experience has been worthwhile, and I'm pretty sure that the feeling of getting back the brainspace that's been devoted to conference things will be nothing short of transcendent.

Oh, and there's a fiction-adjacent side-project that I've somehow gotten drawn into as a side effect of being involved with the conference. But that's all I'll say about that until it's ready to bear fruit. Which, by the look of things, shouldn't be long at all.

The most positive of feedback

I have a friend. Her name is Fran. Fran is an artist and graphic designer.

When I was working on The Lauras, Fran threatened to read it.

And when it came out, she read it.

And apparently she liked it, because she made an art of Alex and Ma (that's a technical term).

And there was much rejoicing, because she drew Alex to look pretty much the way that Alex looks in my head.

And also because my book inspired fanart, and that is high praise indeed.

Italy, Day 2: Venice

I had thought that my foray abroad would continue in the manner of the first day, and I'd find periodic quiet moments for getting work done, updating social media accounts, and suchlike. As is so often the case, I was very wrong about that. So the rest of the account of Italy is about a week late.

When I woke up in Treviso I had all the intentions of going out and seeing the town a bit before heading on to Venice, but when I popped out onto the street I found that it was raining. And not English mizzle, but the kind of rain that you see in Virginia at the tail end of a hurricane. So I went back inside the hotel and drank coffee and wrote for a while. But eventually my worries about not finding the correct train won out over my dislike for getting rained on, and I dragged myself out to find the train station and, since everyone else seemed to have one and they all seemed to look at me like I was crazy for wandering around without one, an umbrella. I managed to do both of these things without actually speaking, and then managed to check out of the hotel and get myself onto the correct train to Venice also without speaking, so I've added 'move to Italy and become a voluntary mute' to my list of possible career choices if writing doesn't pan out.

About halfway to Venice I had a strange moment. The carriage was full mostly of women, and even though I've spent a lot of time in train carriages full mostly of women this was the first time that I looked around and all of the women had the same yellow-green tone to their skin that I do, and the same ill-behaved hair that I do, and more or less the same nose and eyes and awkward body proportions. And while I don't usually find myself surrounded by people that look that radically different from me, I do generally find myself surrounded by people who are more Nordo-Germanic looking than me, so it was the first time that I've ever looked around and thought, I guess I am normal.

Venice itself looks exactly like the pictures, except it feels smaller and cosier than it's generally described to be, at least in my opinion. I had a few free hours before the evening's event, so I wandered around getting lost and rained on and looking into churches while trying to keep my umbrella from blowing inside out. I couldn't actually read the map that I was given of the city, so I accidentally found the Basilica of Santa Maria dei Frari, and also the Church of San Pantalon - which I personally thought was more impressive because the entire ceiling is painted to depict the martyrdom of Saint Pantalon. I also found the church of San Geremia, which houses the remains of Saint Lucy of Syracuse, which I was not expecting to see when I went in.

Yup, those are remains. Image from Wikipedia, because I draw the line at photos in churches. 

I was scheduled for an evening chat at Libreria Marco Polo, but the rain meant the trains were delayed, which meant that Rossella, the publicist who was coming to meet me; the interviewer; and the translator were all delayed, the latter two extremely so. This was dealt with by repairing to the nearest bar for a drink, asking around until someone who spoke both English and Italian was found, and having one of the booksellers do the interviewing until the actual interviewer turned up. Afterwards the chairs were cleared away and furniture rearranged, two boards laid across sawhorses in the middle of the bookshop, and an immense dinner of Afghani food laid out. We stayed up until one in the morning drinking wine and talking about books, which was probably a little ill-advised, considering that we had to wake up at five the next morning to catch the train to Milan.

In retrospect, it's pretty understandable why I couldn't drag myself out of bed the day after getting back from Italy. I don't think I slept more than five hours a night any night I was there.

Italy, Day 1: Treviso

I want to be an adventurer, probably because I read too many books as a kid which focussed on adventurers. The problem with this is that I am, by nature, a timid person who lives in terror of making mistakes and gets along just fine not speaking to another person for days. So when Lucy asked me if I would like to go on a book tour in Italy, the part that has delusions of dragonslaying said yes while the rest was trying to find the courage to say, "...is that such a good idea?" But no one ever became an adventurer by staying home, and I figure if I keep doing things that terrify me then at some point I'll simply run out of terrifying things to do, and then everything will be easy.

A canal in the rain.

Thursday morning I was convinced I'd never make it out of the country: I seem to have a travel curse where Italy is concerned, every plan I make to visit gets cancelled; on top of that I'd come back from the US on Tuesday with a wicked cold and couldn't wrap my head around the travel details that were in English, let alone all of the ones that weren't. In my defence, the times on all of my tickets and the times on my itinerary didn't agree, which would probably make anyone nervous. There was panic about missing my flight on the bus, the train, the tube, the other train, and all through check-in, and then there was a brief respite followed by panic on the flight and all the way to the hotel that I wouldn't go to the right place and there wouldn't be anyone to translate and I'd be sent home in disgrace. There was so much panic over logistics, in fact, that when it actually came time to speak to a roomful of people I couldn't find it in myself to even worry.

A different canal in the rain.

The first place I went was Treviso, which everyone described as a small town but which pretty well awed me. It looked like all of the descriptions I've read in novels set in northern Italy, so it was like arriving in a familiar town that I hadn't seen in a long time, which is similar to how I felt coming to Britain for the first time. It probably added to the sense of familiarity that the hotel they put me in was decorated a lot like my aunt's house, down to the gilt wall sconces.

It's probably time to get a new camera: that's a marble floor, the doors are marquetry, and the furniture is antique. Also, gilt everywhere.

I'm pretty sure my aunt has actually had those wall sconces at some point. The marble-topped nightstand and alligator album she's definitely had.

The evening was chaired and translated by a wonderful woman called Rosanna Martinelli, who teaches literature in English and who I found accidentally as I was coming down the stairs of the hotel, determined to be an adventurer and do some adventuring, just as she was coming up the stairs to find me since I hadn't answered my room phone. Live translation is difficult and time-consuming in the best circumstances, so we plotted out a good part of the discussion beforehand, so that she could focus on translating what I said into Italian without having to translate everything she said into English first. The evening was held in a gorgeous medieval building (as close as I can tell) and seemed to go over well - there were quite a few questions and several very positive comments. So all in all day one went much better than expected. And I managed to get coffee and get myself on the correct train this morning, so so far I'm ten for ten if you ignore the cold.

My mom asked for pictures. Hi Mom!

A passing thought

Hitting 'send' on the email that gives the accountant my books for the tax year feels just as momentous as hitting 'send' on the email that gives my publisher a new book.

 It probably wouldn't feel like such a big deal if I kept my books up to date throughout the year and kept all of my expense documentation in one place, but I don't seem to have the personality that's capable of doing it - though I did resolve at the beginning of the year to not loose my receipts and seem to have more or less managed to do so for once. It would also probably be easier if I started compiling them earlier in the year, rather than thinking I'll get it done in the lazy days of summer that never seem to come.

Maybe when I'm finally finished with school and only have one job I'll finally get on top of it.

All things must come to an end

Today is the first day of my last term as a student (unless I bollocks it up) and marks four solid years since I came to Norwich, sight unseen, armed with a blank notebook, a woollen jacket of insufficient thickness, and the intention of whacking my head against the metaphorical wall until one of the two broke or someone made me stop. Looking back, I'm shocked that it was the wall that gave way, rather than my head, and not just the wall of the university's ivory tower but that of publishing's looming fortress: I never thought I'd make it this far.

I came to Norwich in 2012 with the hope that I'd get a year to breathe: to write, to recover from the illness that had kept me pretty near insensate for six months, to spend time in a country I loved but didn't think would have me and in the same timezone as someone who I loved but who wouldn't let me compromise on my goals for it. I've stayed for longer than I planned, done more than I thought was possible - in fact, pretty much everything I dreamed of doing, except for the 'breathing and resting' part. I thought by now I'd be back in the States, working a dead-end job with health insurance too expensive to actually use and writing stories no one would ever read in my free time. I still feel like an impostor, but it's a simple fact that, if I am, I'm an impostor with two published novels and a thesis in its final stage of revisions,  who trembles at the unknown but jumps into it anyway on the off chance that it will be interesting.

At the end of December I should be turning in my thesis and moving down to Reading. What happens after that, I'm not sure - doubtless the viva and the revisions and the handing in of the final dissertation will take up a lot of time and account for endless fannying about. I'm looking forward to waking up in the same town every morning for a month, and I keep daydreaming about what I'll do when I'm finished, making little lists of the books I want to read and places I want to explore and foods I want to feed Dave while I'm in the post-handin limbo. After that, who knows?

Already I'm sad about the prospect of leaving Norwich. It's been a lovely place to become an adult. It's been a good place to become a writer. I hope it will be a great place to come back to, just as much as I hope I'll have plenty of reasons to come back.

It's not over yet though. And tonight, there will be fencing.

Book Tour!

I'm one of those people that's superstitious about talking about an opportunity until it's pretty certain that it's going to happen, which is why I'm only now saying anything about this: I'm going to be scooting around Italy in October!

The Shore was released in Italy yesterday under the title Tutto il Nostro Sangue, because the nuances of 'shore' don't translate.

I'm probably a little too happy that the version my aunts will read has 'blood' in the title.

So, for the purpose of getting to meet me and talking up the book, my Italian publisher has decided to ship me over for a week in October.

I'll be at the CartaCarbone Festival in Treviso on the 13th of October, then the Marco Polo bookshop in Venice on Friday the 14th, Le Notti Bianche in Pavia and Volante in Lecco on the 15th, Il Mio Libro in Milan on the 16th, and Minimum Fax bookshop in Rome on the 17th.

Considering that I've tried and failed to visit Italy several times over the past decade and a half, I'm more excited about the trip than terrified. The only real issue is that I'm pretty rubbish at languages - In school I studied French for two years, Spanish for five, and Italian for seven, and can navigate exactly none of them. Though they say that finding oneself in a position where one is forced to use the language results in a dramatic increase in understanding.

On the plus side, I'm going back to Virginia for my brother's wedding the week before, so I'll have the chance to refresh the basic phrases ahead of time. Assuming that I can get my uncle to stop worrying about my personal safety long enough to teach me.

Highlights of Edinburgh

Since coming back from Edinburgh on Monday I've had the worst time trying to stay awake, which probably means that the summer has finally caught up to me. Last year my first book had just come out, I knew no one, and I had to leave David at home, so I was generally shy and terrified throughout the festival. This year David came along, I kept running into book people I knew, and even though I was nervous about discussing The Lauras for the first time I had a rough idea of how the evening would go. 

Highlights of the trip include:

- Chatting with Gavin Grant and Olivia Smith, and listening to Kevin Barry's stories about minks, mice, and other vermin. 

- Spending an embarrassing amount of time in the Author's yurt trying to get in as much shop talk as possible. 

- Drinking pints of whisky with Jenni Fagan and Stuart Kelly after the yurt had closed and all sane people gone to bed.

- Dragging Dave to the top of an extinct volcano only to hear American accents. 

- Dragging Dave to eat cranachan and haggis only to hear American accents.

- Fangirling shamelessly over Marcus Sedgwick.

- Getting through my first reading from The Lauras without messing up or cursing. 

- Buying books when I'd promised I wouldn't. 

As the more social of the two of us, Dave made friends with pretty much everyone he came across, and now wants me to hurry up finishing the next book so we can go back.