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. 

The Kitschies

Cuddly tentacles were given out on Monday night, in the downstairs of a pub in London. Like the downstairs of a lot of pubs, this one had a pretty low ceiling, which I only noticed when the actual prize-giving began and nearly all the men who took the microphone had to crouch to avoid braining themselves. My memory of the evening is fuzzy - much like the tentacles - probably because I was preoccupied by the fact that MARGARET ATWOOD WAS THERE and MARGARET ATWOOD WAS WEARING A TENTACLE MONSTER.

Photo borrowed from the kitschie's blog with hopes they won't mind. 

Dave kept trying to make me go and say hello to her - it was a small enough event that that wouldn't have been totally weird - and I kept threatening to deck him if he didn't stop, because I'm of the theory that one should never meet one's heroes unless expressly sought out by them, because there lies the path to madness and restraining orders. I was amused to find out that her agent, who was also there and wearing tentacles, was the agent that made my MA year cry in despair many moons ago. Small world, ain't it?

Only tangentially related: I keep hearing that writers never really get famous because people can't pick them out on the street, and I wonder if it's a symptom of my work, of being connected to UEA, or of having an obsessive personality that I do recognise a lot of the well-respected writers on sight, even ones who I don't personally read and have never actually met. I guess it makes it a little less weird that the ones who I recognise immediately, from the back, and across a crowded room (Ali Smith, Helen Dunmore, Kate Mosse... ok, Margaret Atwood) are all people I've met in person. 

All of the books (and video games) on the shortlists sound amazing. Like most book events, the room was decorated with copies from the shortlist, and I managed to make off with a few, but all of them are going onto my to-read list. And books that more closely fit the criteria of progressive and speculative are going onto my to-write list. 

There must have been something either in the air or the water. About halfway through the evening Dave pulled on my sleeve and said, "Golden Ratio." Then, on the eight-minute tube ride to Liverpool Street Station we worked up the outline of an entire speculative novel from that one concept, wrote it down, and moved on to an epic fantasy blending sci-fi and dragons before having to get off. And now it looks like both of us wish we could temporarily abandon responsibility to go write, which is pretty normal for me but less so for Dave. So if I happen to vanish in the near future, it might have something to do with spirals. 

Tentacles and paperback reviews

So I found out this afternoon that The Shore has been shortlisted for the Golden Tentacle, the category of The Kitschies ("The prize for progressive, intelligent, and entertaining literature with a speculative element") reserved for debut fiction. The fact that The Shore is being considered spec fic makes me clam-in-mud happy - it also makes me really want to go off and write some properly hardcore speculative fiction, but I've promised to finish the current projects before I start anything else. There are five books on the shortlist, and I'm crossing my fingers that I get a chance to get my dirty mitts on the other four. Winners are announced on the 7th of March, which isn't very long to wait at all. And there aren't any poets on the shortlist, so I've got a tiny measure of hope this time.

And while I'm broadcasting news, an author Q&A has gone up on the review site run by Deborah Kalb for anyone who has questions but won't get a chance to ask them. And the Sunday Times ran a review for the paperback edition that was wonderfully positive and used the term 'anti-pastoral.' I'm not sure if I should get that tattooed somewhere or just use it as my work credo - next should come an anti-road novel, then an anti-family drama, and one day maybe an anti-romance if I work really hard.

Usually I dread looking at my email inbox, and doubly dread needing to respond to anything, but after having all of that come in today I'm almost feeling downright fond of the monstrosity...

The Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year

... is most deservedly Sarah Howe for Loop of Jade, a stunning collection of poetry that takes inspiration from the author's dual heritage as the child of a British father and a Chinese mother and her puzzling out of her cultural identity. I'm quite glad both that she won (the collection is seriously wonderful) and that poetry is getting recognition this year, since the landscape for poets so often seems quite bleak. And, as with the Guardian prize, I wish I had found a bookie ahead of time that was running odds.

No one was told ahead of time who the winner was, so I had the chance to chill with the other shortlistees in the Art Room of the London Library. While we were chatting and sipping and trying to quell our nerves before the party I had the odd realisation that it's quite likely we four will be running into each other one way or another for the rest of our professional lives, as will many of the young writers that I've met since March; it was odd but not unpleasant to wonder who of us will park our zimmer frames close together in sixty-odd years so that we can grouse about young upstarts and publishing trends. The party afterwards was very good, though I wound up chatting to too many people to get much to either drink or eat, and was star-struck by Sarah Waters to an embarrassing degree. 

And now that the prize has run its course there is nothing between me and the mound of critical work that came down to Reading to be done during break. 

But then, the laundry does appear to be piling up... 

Aftermath: way too many words about the past week

We appear to have hit the sudden death round of term. Or that could just be an idiosyncrasy of my calendar and everyone else is bopping along the same as always; I'm never sure.

On Monday I skittered to London, first to sit down with Carrie Plitt and Octavia Bright in the Conville and Walsh office to record a segment for Literary Friction, a monthly conversation about books that airs on NTS and that you really should be listening to, then to Foyles to have a chat with Andrew Holgate ahead of the evening's readings. The turnaround between the judges selecting the winning book and the book being announced in the Sunday Times is apparently a hair's breadth, so he interviewed all four of us with the aim of being able to pop out a write-up of the winner in that gap - respect due for journalistic integrity, but I do not envy him. 

Three previous winners of the prize came to speak before the shortlistees, and I just barely managed to not embarrass myself by fawning all over Helen Simpson - "Diary of an Interesting Year" was both an influence for The Shore and used to scar my writing students; "Hey Yeah Right Get a Life" scarred me when I was a student; her stories have been my company back and forth across the ocean and in the darkest parts of sleepless nights - who I never thought I'd have the chance to meet. Andrew Cowan, who I haven't really spoken to since he supervised my MA dissertation, was also there, which was a little odd since I remember exactly nothing from that year and he appears to retain a crystal clear recollection of every moment, which is not a dynamic one wants to have with a director at one's university. 

The actual event went well, but the evening ended with Andrew and I running across London and through the underground in an effort to get to Liverpool Street Station in time for the 22.30 train back to Norwich. We made it to the station at 22.27, winded and sans dignity, to find that the train had been cancelled and the next one left at 23.30 and would take three hours to arrive owing to leaves on the track. To cut a long story short, I made it home by 3 AM having shared a drink, a train carriage table, and a taxi with Andrew, and now know far more UEA gossip than I'd thought I ever would. 

On Tuesday I woke up with the sudden realisation that, if I wanted to get to London on time for the Guardian ceremony on Wednesday, I'd better leave that afternoon. Autumn is the season of cancelled trains in East Anglia, and I've missed too many important things due to being stranded before. So I dragged myself up to pack, deal with the contents of the refrigerator, do the dishes, put in some laundry, and all of the other little things a body has to do before they leave the house for a week. 

Given how little sleep I'd gotten, I was a bit shocked that I managed to get myself in gear and out the door in time to catch the 15.30 train. Which was cancelled. But that was a good thing, because I found when I got to the station that I'd lost my railcard the night before. No one had found it, but they could make me a new one if I could get my hands on a passport photo. So I ran with my suitcase across the road to find a photo booth, cried just enough that the lady at the counter accepted my student card as proof that I was a student, and got on the 16.00 train just before it left. And then realised that I'd left my rings on the counter of the kitchen that my housemate is inevitably going to destroy this weekend, and if he can make tupperware and five gallon slow cookers vanish then a few bands of silver have no chance. 

That train was delayed, so when we finally got to London I had to fight my way off against the tide of people trying to get on, even though they had fifteen minutes before the train left to go back to Norwich. I spent twelve of those minutes in the station trying to find dinner before I realised that I'd left my suitcase with all of my work in it on the train, one minute panicking, forty-five seconds sprinting from one end of the station to the other in the hope that the train hadn't left yet, and thirty seconds babbling at rail workers in a panic as I sprinted down the platform, leapt into the carriage I'd ridden down on, ripped the damn suitcase out of the luggage rack, and fell back onto the platform a few seconds before the doors were due to lock. 

The next ten minutes were spent in the fetal position on the platform.  

So on Wednesday, when nothing happened to prevent me from getting to Blackfriars Bridge to meet Lucy in time to walk over to the OXO building for the Guardian party, I was nothing but relieved. And when we were standing on the stairs waiting to get into the party and talking about who we thought was going to win, all I wanted was to not win because I couldn't scare up any more nerve. And when it came down to it, I knew what book was going to win, because you don't announce a shortlist with "Book of poetry on shortlist for the first time in forever! Oh, there are these other five books, too" when the poetry isn't going to win. And then when it was announced that Physical was the winner I was far more satisfied than I should have been because I'd guessed correctly. 

It was an absolutely fantastic party, made just a little bit more fantastic by the fact that I (purposefully) look nothing like the one publicity photo that exists, so I got to spend the first half of the evening chatting with my publishers and my spouse-thing and taking unabashed advantage of our proximity to the door whence the food was issuing, while people who were meant to pin me down for a picture or a chat walked right past holding a reference photo taken when I had red hair.  Dave gave the game away when a woman with a massive camera and pictures of all the long-list authors came up and asked him if he was Peter Pomerantsev; it then took him an embarassingly long time to convince her that I am me. At which point I had drunk enough that talking to people wasn't scary at all, and I had a good long natter with several readers and quite a few industry people. I also at that point had no shame. Book events tend to be decorated with books, so several copies of the shortlist books were scattered tastefully around the room; this may or may not bear relationship to the fact that when I got home at 2 in the morning I somehow had the entire shortlist under my arm.

How did that get there?

And yesterday evening I had Thanksgiving dinner with my alma mater's study abroad group, caught up on the gossip back at home campus, gave out their class rings, and may have broke down sobbing when we sang the school song at the end of the evening. 

So today is, technically, the first day this week that I've got any hope of getting actual work done. But then, the kitchen cabinets could always stand to be alphabetised...

The Guardian First Book Award

I must have a forgotten stash of four-leaf clovers somewhere, because it was announced earlier today that The Shore is on the Guardian First Book Award shortlist! It's one of six, and they all are excellent books; The Guardian has a piece up on the process of whittling down the list, which does not sound as though it was easy to do. The winner will be announced on the 25th of November, so I'll just have everything crossed until then.

Surprise and the Sunday Times

I hadn't known that the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award had been revived, or that I've now been in the UK long enough to be considered a British writer by their standards and therefor be in the running, so I was more than a little shocked to find out that The Shore has made the shortlist. So now I will do my happy dance, but not for long because a shortlist means skittering down to London quite a bit over the next few weeks. One of those skitters is going to be for an evening at Foyles Bookshop on Monday the 23 of November, which will include reading and conversation from the four shortlisted authors and beer and pizza for the audience; it's free, but you have to go to their website and reserve a ticket, I'm guessing so that they'll have enough pizza if real life is anything like uni. 

The other three authors on the shortlist are Sarah Howe for Loop of Jade, Sunjeev Sahota for The Year of the Runaways, and Ben Fergusson for The Spring of Kasper Meier. Peters, Fraser, and Dunlop, the agency that is in part responsible for the prize, has bios and blurbs on their website for the curious, and two of the judges, Peter Kemp and Sarah Waters, appeared on Open Book this past weekend to discuss the books.

And I'm personally amused that the three women involved are all called Sara(h).

Things Going On

I've been a day late and a dollar short in pretty much all regards for the majority of the year. But in the interest of seeing if I can make it to the end of December without completely admitting failure, here's a brief list of Things Going On:

#30Authors is going on right now! A review a day will be going up for the entire month of September, and I understand that at some point there will be a shot at free books.

The Shore has made the longlist for the Guardian First Book Award - and it is a tantalising list indeed. I was with my family when I found out, and even after a solid hour of explaining I'm pretty sure that none of them understand what the Guardian is...

On Sunday the 27th of September I'm going to be at the Small Wonder Festival in East Sussex, chatting with Nicholas Shakespeare about short stories and other things. The festival is held at Charleston, which was at one point occupied by the Bloomsbury Group, and which is well worth seeing on its own merit.

The Parisot Literary Festival is taking place on the 23-25 of October, and I'm going to be there for the duration!

... and as soon as I click 'publish' I'll remember a half dozen other things that should really be mentioned, but oh well.

Houston, we have achieved orbit

I've fallen off the face of the earth this month due to an all but doomed attempt to finish a final pass on the as yet nameless novel from the MA before I go to visit my grandfather. Summer is always shorter than it looks. But I've touched down for a moment to make sure said grandfather is actually expecting me (he's a bit of a recluse; the last time he allowed someone to visit him a Bush was in the White House) and I realised that things are going on.

The Shore has (somehow, inexplicably) been nominated for Not The Booker, which is a bit of fun run by the Guardian that has for the past six years or so determined The People's Choice for book of the year in democratic fashion. Which means that anyone who wants to can mosey on over and put in their two votes for any of the 70 books on the list. It may be the final bastion of true democracy in the universe, so take advantage.

On Friday the 21st of August at 3.30 in the afternoon I'm going to be at the Edinburgh Book Festival chatting with Michael F Russell about freaky communities. Ok, I'll be at the book festival for most of that week, but if you want to heckle or sling tomatoes, that's the best time to do it. Edinburgh, as it happens, also runs a democracy-based award for first books, with the added bonus that everyone who votes gets entered in a drawing to win the entire 56 book longlist. Go and vote, because everyone likes free books. And if you don't like books they'd probably make a charming fortress.

And finally, I've been asked to natter on about the last thing I read that lit my fire for #30Authors, which is an event run by The Book Wheel where thirty writers write about their favourite recent reads on thirty book blogs over the thirty days of September. I hear there's a good chance that this could involve giveaways...

And now, back to the noveling!

A most eventful week

Things I have learned this week: The Women's Prize has the best parties, Cambridge is lovely, publishing is full of awesome women, and Ali Smith is more lovely than words can describe. Ok, I knew the last one already, but it always bears repeating.

Monday evening the Women's Prize shortlist was announced, which means I got to skibble down to one of the Serpentine Galleries in London and spend the evening drinking champagne and Baileys, eating the best canapés I've ever encountered, and geeking out about books with some of the most well spoken and intelligent women I've ever encountered. I am somewhat relieved that The Shore didn't make the shortlist (though I blame Philip for jinxing it), as I found out that evening that shortlistees are going to be involved in what sounds like a terrifying number of public events for horrifyingly large numbers of audience members. Considering that I still hyperventilate and freeze in front of my classroom of thirteen students, that could only have ended messily.

Coming back from London I made a shocking error in judgement with regards to trains, and wound up waiting in Cambridge for the 2 AM National Express to Norwich to stop. Which makes a good story, but is something I'm going to try to avoid doing again.

On Saturday I got to go back to Cambridge by National Express, thankfully not at 2 AM, to be handy for the debut writer panel run by Ali Smith at the Cambridge Lit Festival on Sunday morning. The other two ladies were Sarah Bannan, whose novel Weightless reminded me of both The Virgin Suicides (in a very good way) and the parts of my childhood I haven't had the courage to write about yet, and Claire Lowdon, whose novel Left of the Bang is tight and suspenseful in a way that demands you keep reading as quick as you can while simultaneously demanding that you put it down for a moment to give your heart a rest. We had the chance to chat with each other in the green room ahead of the event, and I really hope that I run into both of them again. 

And today I return to real life, and the final week of classes. I'm a bit sad that I probably won't be teaching this batch of students again, somewhat relieved that I'll be getting my life back. There are more things that I want to do than can possibly be done over this summer - which thankfully hasn't booked up yet, though I already know that I'm going to be pretending to be a professional at the Edinburgh Festival on the 21st of August. Perhaps this summer will actually go to plan, for once.

Dry-gulched by good news

I've been keeping my head down for the past few months, avoiding reviews and write-ups not as much in an 'I've transcended the need for other's approval of my work' way as in a 'holy crap how am I supposed to get all this marking done' way. Both of which, I suppose, garner the same result: I have even less of an idea of what's going on than usual.

So imagine my surprise when I got a text from Sara Helen (who is the kind of together person who usually knows what's going on) saying I was on the same longlist as Ali Smith. I assumed this meant that someone had done a round-up - x books that challenge the concept of structure, y books with female narrators, z books by authors with last names whose initial letter come after 'R' in the alphabet - that had been shared out for other's reading pleasure. But any list on which Ali Smith appears is bound to be a good list to be on, so I went to investigate.

The longlist in question happens to be for the Baileys Women's Prize.

The Prize's existence I was aware of before, but in much the same way I'm aware of knighthoods and the Nobel: it exits, other people are considered for it.

The Shore is one of twenty books in the running; the complete list can be read here and is utterly fantastic. And I'm counting that as my accomplishment for the decade, since the longlist is so much more than I'd been expecting - it wasn't so long ago that I was gearing myself up for agent rejections. I'm very glad that I wasn't aware that it was up for consideration, and I'm somewhat regretting having looked up the details of the judging process, since I can do absolutely nothing but wait, impotently, until it's over.

Amusingly enough, Henry appears to have found out through an online betting service e-mailing to offer him 33 to 1 odds on me winning.