Back at the ranch...

It may not look like it, but the third year of the PhD has actually kicked off, and I've been actively participating in it.  So far, it's been a bit like going to cross the street, successfully dodging an out-of-control car, only to have a sinkhole full of bears open up beneath me the moment I hit the far sidewalk. Suddenly all of the Personal and Professional Development sessions on grant writing and job hunting are relevant and necessary, and a year isn't looking like a whole lot of time to get what I've done so far into the shape of a thesis. At some point in the past month or so the weekly beer-and-bitch session in the grad bar turned into a water-and-plan-this-conference-we-want-to-make-happen session, a different group of people cornered me in the bar while I had a fever and now I'm part of the group running the annual short story contest, and I'm scared to open any of my email inboxes.

 The first draft of Belief has been done for long enough that the feeling of accomplishment has worn off, but not so long that I've gotten around to typing it all up, which doesn't matter so much because I'm only allowed to submit 80,000 words of it at maximum. (The fact that I've groused about this at length should surprise exactly nobody). For months now I've been saying, mostly to Henry, that I need to sit down with that first 80k and give them a structural pounding before anything else useful can happen, but for various reasons ("It's summer! School is ages away!! Let's go to this festival and talk to people about books!!!) I've polished up random bits of new material to meet the past few deadlines and weathered the 'you can do better than this' lectures that they elicited.

Ok, it wasn't all laziness and butterflies; my other supervisor gave me the first week of November as the deadline to send her a reasonable draft of a 35 page journal article and I dropped pretty much everything but Shore stuff in order to get it done. Except she's on research leave and I haven't heard back from her since I sent the draft and I'm scared to message again and ask if she's seen it because I know she's going to give me another deadline that I can't make.

But I've finally gotten nervous about the ultimate deadline: October 2016 will mark the end of three years in the program and the beginning of when I'm allowed to submit a thesis. It also marks the end of my funding and the point when I really need to have figured out what I'm going to be doing, professionally speaking, after UEA ejects me from her sacred halls. And between that and Henry's almost telling off the fire appears to be lit beneath my posterior.

So how, exactly, do you turn 160,000-odd rambling first draft words into something that can be turned in without it looking like you're taking the piss? I have no idea, but here's what I'm doing:

It's been two years since I wrote the opening pages of the draft, so I honestly haven't got a clue what happens in the beginning, besides knowing it doesn't look a lot like what's on my outline. So  I sat down with the first 100,000 words of the draft and went through, page by page, writing an outline of what actually happens in the book, along with the dates because I am horrible at keeping timelines. Once that was done it was easy to see that I'd jumped all over the timeline while I was writing it, frequently revisiting earlier passages or jumping ahead to scenes I felt like writing. So I cut up the outline (all five pages of it) and put it in the order it was supposed to be in, and then used that as a guide to cut up the actual 100,000 words and put them in the order that I should have had them in in the first place. That was actually the quick part. The past few days and the rest of the weekend have been given over to the slow part: going through a paper copy of the manuscript with a needle-tipped blue pen, marking up all of the places that need to be expanded or moved or have details added, reconciling ages and dates and crossing chunks of needless waffling out, and writing up sticky notes with the details of scenes that need to be added but that I didn't know needed to be added when it was all out of order.

It's incredibly messy, and it does make me wish a little bit that I had written the book chronologically. But I've never really been able to write chronologically; more often than not, it's later scenes that make me realise what ought to have come before. And at any rate, it beats doing taxes.

A brief interlude (real information to follow when the deadline has been met)

I'm sitting at my (mostly clean) desk at the moment drinking hot toddies and wrangling with the same critical chapter that I've been working on since July. Fortunately, this time there are no elf footprints involved, though I do have the 1973 edition of a fiction textbook open next to me for reference. A fiction textbook, may I say, that manages to consist entirely of extracts from popular children's and young adult fiction (of the time) and yet only contains four female protagonists in nearly six hundred pages and approximately 35 pieces of fiction; they are a whale (of indeterminate type), a dragon, a little girl of the everyday sort, and a princess.

I have read this book at least a dozen times so far; the extracts that I've picked specifically to support my arguments I've been over more frequently. But it's been mostly fun, because quite a few of the pieces in the book are extracted from novels I read as a kid.

Which made me realize something.

Most of the fiction that was available to me as a child and young adult was about boys becoming men and girls becoming their doorprizes; all of the books that stuck with me were about boys struggling to find their places in the world so that they could be recognized as Men. And since there weren't any other fully fleshed out characters around, I identified with those boys; and when I was a confused adolescent I identified with their struggle towards an elusive but noble Manhood. And then after all of that vicarious living, my parents were mystified at my hostility to their insistence that I act like a lady. I knew, by then, exactly what happened to ladies: even if they didn't get killed so that the boy-man could have some personal growth or emotional epiphany, nothing worthwhile really happened to them.

I'm still waiting to be called on my quest, to be given the sword that proves that I am the long-lost son of whomever, and to fight my way to take my place as rightful king of nowhere and rule with a firm but kind ethos. And I still wonder why, when I've been give the option to see myself as the lost prince, the once and future king, the assistant pig keeper, I'm expected to choose instead to be the baby-minder who never gets to go anywhere.