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.

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.

It is finished

I'm not entirely certain when I decided that I wanted to have three novels written by the time I turned thirty, but I know that it was long enough ago that even one novel seemed pretty dang near impossible.

 I do know that it was only a few days ago that I had the abrupt urge to finish Belief before I turned twenty-seven, because that seemed suddenly to be a talismanic milestone to achieve, and because I'd already missed the official deadline to finish the thing anyway.

So today I sat down, inked a bunch of pens, and stayed sitting down until it was finished, which took more words than I had anticipated when I wrote out the little yellow sticky note that told me how to finish it. Part of this is possibly because of the two completely unexpected sex scenes that I didn't know belonged near the end until I found myself writing them, but mostly I think I was scared to be finished with something so big, and scared to be without a first draft on the go for the first time since 2011. But there is only so much drain-circling you can do before you put down that last line and find that you've found the end.

It didn't kill me after all.

It's taken up two notebooks - there are only eight blank pages left in the second one - and a horrifying amount of ink - this morning alone took a converter and a half, and the pen companies love to go on about how long those things will last. I have no idea how many words it is, apart from knowing that it passed the 100k mark somewhere near the beginning of the second notebook.

Thumb for scale - the second notebook is at school and I'm not, so just imagine two of those. 

Some people talk about books like they're babies, which on a level I can understand. This one felt more like a tumour, except a tumour that I had to cut out of my self, an inch every day. And now that it's a mess sitting on the desk I have this weird empty feeling where it used to be. The urge to sit down and chip away at it is gone, because there isn't anything to chip away at.

Maybe now I'll actually get a chance to write some short stories again.

Digging myself out

The end of term felt a little like re-entering Earth's atmosphere, with extra emphasis on the high-speed-towards-the-ground part, possibly because I dealt with the impossible workload by getting up early, staying up late, and eating exactly what my internal toddler demanded. So now that all of the really important deadlines are past it feels not so much like I've hit the wall as become embedded in the wreckage that was wall before I came at it at terminal velocity. I may have completely stopped responding to emails. And phone calls. And text messages. And my own name.

But on the upside, I'm in Reading once again with the work that I enjoy and free access to David's sweaters. And yesterday The Shore came out in the USA and Canada, which I've been looking forward to for so long that I completely blanked on the date - first I forgot that it hadn't come out already, then I forgot it was May already. Then my mother sent me this:

In hindsight, I'm really glad that I've got the next few projects on the go; if I'd waited until now to start the next thing I'd probably be too intimidated to begin. Although I've been told off recently by several people for having more than one project on the go at once, so there may indeed be no way to win at this besides utterly transcending my personal flaws.

Also also, somewhere in there I managed to come up with the bare bones of an author's website, almost as if I am a real, live adult!

It's possible that the only thing that is saving me at the moment is that I've got two books to work on at once. One book is at the first draft stage, and I found a while back that if I spend too much of the day writing I stop being able to speak. The other book is going through its first full revision, and if I spend too much of the day revising I usually manage to retain my powers of speech, but stop making any logical sense. So the net result is that I have one project to keep me busy in the morning, the other to keep me busy in the afternoon, and have generally stopped talking or making sense.

The first draft of the book for Henry is a little more than two thirds done, and looks like this: 

The closed notebook is full, the open notebook has about ten thousand words in it, and it's hard to tell from the photograph but the three sheets of A4 are the latest version of the outline and all but part three is checked off. And one of those pens has a very flat spot in the nib tip from dramatic overuse. 

 So, in an effort to preserve the tipping of my other pens I've switched back to bottled ink - cartridges are fun for variety, but they tend to flow slower than I write, which leads to drying up and scratching and nibs not lasting as long as they should.

The other piece of work (and it is a piece of work in every sense of the word) looks like this:

This is the novel that I wrote during the MA - in case I never said while I was working on it, it follows a woman and her kid on a trip across America in an attempt to settle a lifetime's worth of unfinished business. The stack on the left is the 149 pages that I've so far annotated for revision, and the so much smaller stack on the right are the 50 pages that still need to be gone through. Which, all things considered, isn't all that much left to comb through. This one will probably get a second go-through as I'm putting the ink and paper edits into the Word document, but I'm starting to get a sense of what shape it might be when it's finished - and starting to get a sense that it will be finished sooner than later. And, publishing aside, that's the really exciting part.