And so it goes...

I'm just a little bit proud of the fact that I got through a first pass of The Lauras in 36 hours, which means that the resulting draft is shorter by about 17,000 words (or one word in six) and the notes that Jason sent me now look like this:

 I'm trying to be organised, Mom, I swear! 

Since the first pass was mainly about reducing the size of the book like a contestant on a medically questionable reality TV show, any note that couldn't be dealt with by making a straightforward cut got marked with a tab. And since I'm eternally trying to overcome my entropic nature, they're colour coded: green-yellow is for notes that need a second look, pink for timeline issues, blue for differences of opinion, and orange for those rare moments where I have no idea what the note is asking me to do.

There aren't that many tabs, all things considered, but cutting that much will have left narrative holes that need to be puttied in. I've also got notes from Lucy that I'm hoping will cover anything that my editor missed.

Juuuust a little more intimidating than all the coloured tabs.

And while I'm at it, there's my own self to satisfy. During the cutting portion I kept running across sentences that needed to be tightened up, which means that I'm probably far enough away from the thrill of having written the thing to be able to see it clearly. Which means it's time to go through and make sure that every single word is the exact perfect word and ruthlessly remove any that aren't.

So, with all that to do and limited time to do it in, it makes perfect sense that the moment I finished the first pass was the moment that my brain decided it was vacation time, as certain brains are wont to do. What have I been doing since I finished the first past? God alone knows, because I sure don't. When will my brain come back and start behaving? With any luck, the moment I click publish and go make another cup of coffee. But that's assuming I don't run into any half-read books on the way back.

Paperback

I poke my nose above the drift of books and papers to say that, after having moved around quite a bit, the UK release date for the paperback edition of The Shore is February 25th! Though they lack the bludgeoning capabilities of hardback, I've always had a soft spot for softcover books - they seem more tactile, and they tend to be easier to lug around. A hardback belongs on the shelf where it can look impressive, a paperback belongs in the hand. And I always feel like I've committed a crime when my hardcover books get mussed, while the softcovers need the mussing to feel broken in and comfortable.

The US release date shouldn't be far behind, but I'm blowed if I can figure out when it is. My guess is that it will also move around a bit and then leap out when no one suspects - as so much in publishing seems to do.

On the topic of things leaping out unexpected: I've gotten back into the horrible habit of inbox watching, because any minute now either or both of my editors will send through their final stack of notes for The Lauras. Until that happens I'm stuck plodding responsibly on with postgraduate work, which wouldn't be that bad except I know that the moment that I start enjoying it the edits will come and I'll have to abandon censorship for the sake of finishing the book on time. I'm a bit tempted to get some chalk and the Harry Potter books and see if I can bastardise a spell into summoning edits in my kitchen - I was never allowed to read Harry Potter because it apparently taught you how to do magic, but given the time crunch I'm pretty sure a little magic would be more than justified.

The wreck's progress

About a week ago, as I was toddling back up to Norwich, I realised how many days weren't left in January. But my sense of time is rather bad, so I didn't start seriously fretting until I got the email from Jason that essentially ran, 'It's the last week of the month... where's the book?' At which point literally everything else was dropped, and anything that couldn't be dropped I brought my computer along to so that I could tweak lines during slack moments. So on Friday at half two in the afternoon, while sitting in the postgrad bar, I found myself unexpectedly at the end once again. And I sent the new draft off to Jason before I could talk myself into messing with it some more. And then I walked home feeling like my arm had dropped off, because it's been the only thing I've thought about in the past month and suddenly not needing to think about it felt wrong.

And then I got sick again. 

I've always spent term time getting whatever was going around, but this year's been a little ridiculous.  It's gotten to the point that I grab cold medicine every time I get groceries, because I know it'll be used. 

Between having finished a major project and spending the weekend being useless and miserable, I figured a reward was in order. So I went to the children's section of the uni library (we have a children's section; it is excellent) and had a poke around. And found this:

My love for this book and the age when I first read it probably explains a lot. 

When I was nearly nine my parents moved us from a tiny house right down the street from my aunt to a much bigger house in the county where most of the dying in the American Civil War took place, and where everyone I met was (is) still obsessed with it. 

I hated it. 

The only redeeming feature of the place was the size and quality of its library system. My sister was born weeks after the move, so no one paid much attention to what I was getting out. So the first (and for a while, the only) thing that made me happy in that place was Joan Aiken's books. After a while I began branching out, but I still vividly remember sitting on the cold kitchen floor on a blazing June afternoon, all the lights off and no one making a sound because Dinky and Mom were asleep, reading Blackhearts on Battersea as slowly as I could because it was almost over and I didn't want to come back to reality. They were the books that first made me want to see England - and now that I have seen England they're more than overdue for a re-read.

The cover's different from the one I first read, but the illustrations are the same!

And on the subject of books: when I got back a heap of them were waiting for me, because I'd had the presence of mind to do all of my overseas ordering before I left for Christmas. There are some good ones that I've been looking for for a while, but my favourite by far is:

Answer: it depends on whether or not you consider teaching your kids critical thinking to be 'harming' them. 

I'm still useless and miserable, but the next book is one step closer to done. Next should come line notes, then copyeditor's notes and page proofs, then a bound proof, then it's all over but the shouting. And when I think of it that way, August doesn't seem far away at all. 

Revision and paperback

I've been eaten by revisions. Which is preferable to being eaten by my thesis; at least my editor gives positive feedback. Last Monday I sat down and rewrote the first thirty pages. On Tuesday I realised that the rewrite was crap and re-rewrote the first thirty pages. On Wednesday I woke up with the conviction that the version from a year ago was actually much better than I first thought and used it to rewrite the re-rewrite. This weekend Dave went down to Brighton and I stayed home and did my night-owl thing and managed to hit the halfway point.

Behold: the editorial notes. Though about two pages of that is notes to self. 

 People have said that the reason it's called 'revision' is that it's a process of re-seeing, more than rewriting. You have to see what's on the page with clear eyes before you can know what it needs to make it better. In my case it's more a process of re-digesting; now that I've gotten to the midpoint the little voice in my head keeps chiming in with comments like 'you know, what you really need to do to chapter 2 is...' And then I have to go back to chapter 2, which does usually make chapter 2 better but makes the whole longer, which is a problem in its own right because the whole needs to lose about twenty thousand words of deadweight before it can be called finished.

About the point last week where I was despairing of ever getting to page 31, I got a surprise through the mail slot:

It has spot gloss

And creepy people

I've got a weakness for book-related art. It's not so common to find people's impression of a book transmuted into another form, and seeing how someone else would present my work visually makes me as excited as the existence of the physical book does. Which is a level of excited that is pretty difficult to touch; I've got a weakness for paperbacks.

The innards have been dressed up, too!

Notes

On the absolute last day in 2015 before I completely gave up and surrendered to Christmas, family, and what is starting to look like a chronic respiratory infection, I toddled into London to see Jason. It was one of the more entertaining trips: the man seated next to me on the Tube was reading appallingly unedited erotica in eighteen-point font on the largest tablet known to humanity (the word 'panties' was used without a touch of irony, and the wrong 'their' and 'to' was used repeatedly.  (I read far too fast for my own good.)) and I got to the Random House office just in time to get a good seat in the lobby to watch as a pair of uniformed Metropolitan Police wandered in and asked to speak to the person who had phoned about receiving a bomb threat (Said threat came in the form of a letter, because publishing is apparently nothing if not completely civil at even the worst of times.).

The next draft of the nameless novel is due at the end of January, and rather than go back and forth by phone and email and muddle through tracked changes and misinterpret written instruction and get everything confused, someone (it may have been me, I don't remember) decided that the best way to get to understandable, executable editorial notes was for me to sit down with Jason and talk through everything that either of us thought might need addressing. This was much more enjoyable than one might expect, since there are several things about the current draft that I'm not crazy about and wanted to figure out just how much bending someone else thought they might be able to take, as well as several parts that are not as bad as I thought.

And now that it's the first day of 2016 on which I can reasonably expect to get work done it's time to take the pages of notes I wrote during that meeting out and see what can be done with the book. Which, despite our having talked about it as much as anyone can a work in progress without completely killing it, still doesn't seem to have a final title. The two at the top of the list at the moment are In Passing and The Lauras, but I'm expecting to hear from Jason at any minute that he's changed his mind. Not only is it difficult to talk about a book with no title, but the cover artist can't get started with her design until the name of the thing is nailed down, so it would be nice to have the name pinned firmly down. Given the fact the publication date is less than nine months away, I'm starting to wonder if it's possible for a book to go forth into the world nameless and come to anything but misfortune.

A Henry moment

I went to go see Henry the other day for the first time since term broke up this past spring. This necessitated telling him about the book that will be published, which is, incidentally, the book that I got told off for working on when I was supposed to be working on the PhD book. But in between telling me off and seeing me again he's read a draft of the book that will be published and has essentially reversed his earlier ruling. And in so doing he came out with what I'm beginning to think of as a Henryism, which is a statement or two that is at once amusing, embarrassing, and surprisingly insightful:

"There is nothing wrong with a novel about gender and wanking."

And there is nothing that I could say to that, apart from dare him to send it in when he's solicited for a jacket quote.

The next book

When Heinemann offered on The Shore I had a sneaking suspicion that it was a one-time triumph, and that after that first book was done and dusted I'd have to resign myself to an adulthood of actual adulting, and that any books that I happened to write after that would wind up in a desk drawer. So I am very pleasantly surprised that this isn't going to be the case just yet. The roadtrip novel I spent the summer busily revising (and for which no one, including the staff and editors at two publishing houses, can come up with a satisfactory name) has been picked up by Jason Arthur at Heinemann, and should be released (hopefully with a staggeringly beautiful title) in the summer of 2016.

The timeline for this one is much tighter than for the first - I should be dragging myself through edits before the year is over, hopefully while not under the influence of prescription anything this time, and all in all it looks like there will be a lot more hustling and a lot less sitting around. Two books in as many years is not usual in literary fiction - and my other work is showing why quite clearly - so it will probably be a while before Belief surfaces. This time around I feel a lot more relaxed about the whole thing, since I know how it all generally goes. But the biggest difference is, since the deal went through, I feel like I can call myself a professional writer now.

On a completely different note, I wonder what Henry will say...

Recovering

If ever I fake my own death it will probably be an accident, considering that this summer a few people, Lucy included, were temporarily under the impression that I'd shuffled off the mortal coil. Though I have been tempted to fake my own kidnapping once or twice before, for the sake of getting a little work done.

July was spent, as mentioned before, trying to polish off a still nameless novel, which has since been passed on to Lucy and even now is lurking in at least one reading pile that I can think of - which is probably why I've suddenly gotten so much better at keeping my phone charged and in my pocket. The day after it was handed off I dragged the Englishman to meet my grandfather, which hasn't happened before because said grandfather doesn't fly and I don't Florida, which is where he happens to have wedged himself in. It also happens that he's a retired NASA physicist, so I spent the week playing with ion mass spectrometers and scribbling down the stories he told while the two of them talked philosophy. Then we hauled butt to the Shore, with a detour along the way to fetch my little sister from summer camp, because the Englishman has never seen the Shore and I miss it.

The day after I made it back to my usual timezone, I packed up and went to Edinburgh. Which was unexpectedly lovely, given the amount of carping I've heard from people about Scotland. Besides dragging myself up Calton Hill and being treated to the unexpected sight of a dozen well-muscled men wearing nothing but kilts, I also dragged myself up Arthur's Seat, and saw the absolute worst stand-up comedy that has ever been performed anywhere by anyone. The Book Festival sticks its authors in an actual yurt when they're not in use, and since Jura was a sponsor there was a full bottle of whisky out to be poured from at will every evening I was there. The actual event in which I participated was the most enjoyable I've ever done; the chair was lovely, the audience was lovely, Michael Russell was lovely, I didn't misspell anyone's name when I signed their book, and I didn't do anything that I need to be ashamed of. Though I did manage to trigger an audience gasp of horror: the chair asked who we'd have for a fantasy dinner party; I asked if it was a party to have a nice chat or for the sole purpose of putting strychnine in the soup, because I'd been waiting for the day to poison Phillip Pullman since I read The Amber Spyglass as a child.

And almost immediately following my return from Edinburgh came the holiday weekend and the Reading Festival, where I saw bands playing live that I can't name because it'll just sound like bragging.

Even making allowances for my fuzzy math skills, I think I've had five actual working days in the month of August.

So now it's back to work. I'm hoping that, any day now, my head will break water. Though it's more likely that Henry will find out how little I've gotten done. Or rather, how much more there still is to do. I should be hauling carcass back to Norwich for the last year of the degree in a few weeks, and usually my work life takes over once I'm back. The room we began turning into an office at the beginning of the summer will be getting a floor tomorrow, so of course I'll be going back the moment that it's actually finished and useable. I have a half-hope still that having a designated room of my own, instead of working off the dining room table and being moved around constantly, will mean that I'll get more work done while I'm down in Reading, because it feels like I simply don't work enough while I'm here. Of course, the converse is equally likely to be true: I do far too much work while I'm in Norwich and if I keep up that pace something will spontaneously combust.

Heaven alone knows what will happen once I graduate and home and work find themselves merging.

A sense of an ending

In February of 2013 I started writing a novel - an actual, linear, one narrator novel - for the first time since before I started college, because Ali Smith told me to. I didn't think I'd be able finish it, so I went for the first idea I had that seemed to have potential. And I thought trying to write something long would make the exercise worthwhile enough, so I decided to ignore everything professors had tried to hammer into me over the course of five years of higher education in favour of doing exactly what I wanted to do with it, because I was frankly sick of being told 'you can't.' It was probably the most well-behaved tantrum ever. By the end of January 2014 I had produced this:

The little tan one has notes and chronologies and things, because I learned my lesson with The Shore

 Which was a bit of a surprise, because I'd abandoned it several times over the course of the first draft. And then in September 2014 I managed to turn it into this:

It was only when I finished that I realised that this one has no death and hardly any graphic violence. 

Which was too embarrassingly horrible to show to anyone, and was almost chucked out in favour of any other novel I could be writing. But it was 93,500 words long, which is an awful lot of words to just throw away, so I figured that I could make another passthrough, cut all of the dreadful parts, and possibly come out the end with a novella.

Except on July 1st I finished the passthrough by writing a new ending that actually felt like an ending rather than an arbitrary stopping point and found that, despite the fact that I had cut about five thousand words outright and moved another five thousands to a file called 'darlings' that will never see light of day, the whole thing had grown to just over a hundred thousand words, which lands it pretty solidly in 'novel' territory. And, mysteriously, I felt like it was as done as I could get it without external input.

So that's one of the two novels I need to write this summer finished, or as finished as I can get it, and sent off to Lucy to see if these bones might live. And even though I still have a horrifying amount of work to do, I have the strangest feeling that I've actually gotten something done.

And now to finished book number three!

Just another day of revision...

My web browser has tabs open to the UC Davis Veterinary Medicine page, the Doctor of Vet Med curriculum, a search result on crisis pregnancy centres, a page of search results on 'adoption in the 1980s', a history of forced sterilisation in the US, a calendar for 2004, several Google street views of Las Vegas, the Wikipedia page for second-wave feminism, several photographs of New England lobster boats and Floridian crab boats, the Web MD brief history of mifepristone, and Amazon pages for Building Your Cult: Power, Politics, and People and Combatting Cult Mind Control, two indispensable volumes for the modern reader.  Drugs don't get much of a look-in this time because I did way more research than was really necessary for The Shore, and I have the kind of freaky memory that can't recall my spouse's birthday but can perfectly recall useless information from years ago.

The good thing about all that is that the novel is no longer riddled with embarrassing notes like (insert two paragraph description of a crab boat). The bad thing is that it's starting to get too long to be easy to handle, which is odd because it seemed almost too short to be a proper novel, both when I was first writing it and every time I look at the skinny little notebooks in which I wrote it. I have an unhealthy preoccupation with tracking my progress in fractions, which gets more difficult at a certain length because Word gives up on providing a word count once the 100,000 word mark is reached. After 99,999 you're on your own for some reason.

Pictured: the moment before I stopped being able to figure out exactly how many words I had left to clean up without a serious amount of jiggery-pokery.

The beast still lacks a title, but I'm starting to be a little less ashamed of it, or most of it at any rate. Though I do wonder what the NSA makes of my Google habits.

Note to self

It's a pain to keep track of timeline and continuity in a rough draft. But it's even more of a pain to piece together timeline and continuity from context clues in a later draft and have to rework it all because your characters have somehow lived through three summers in a row and the year you've described is only five months long.

On a related note, Present Sara really has it in for Past Sara today.