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.

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.

The editorial process - with pictures!

Somewhere near the end of September, the first round of editorial notes for The Shore popped up in my inbox. Since I was in the middle of making a wedding happen at the time, I wailed in desperation once, plowed through them as thoroughly as possible, and winged the result back to my editor. I'm not sure if it's the same across the board, but in this case the notes consisted of a list of comments regarding specific pages and lines, and a shorter list of comments on the general structure and content. For the most part they were about things that had been bothering me already; the biggest change was cutting out one chapter and dividing the longest chapter into two, a massive change which massively improves things but that I wouldn't have had the resolution to do on my own.

Fast forward a month or so (thankfully to the other side of the wedding) and a two-inch thick printed version of the manuscript arrived by post, having been thoroughly gone over by a copyeditor:

The fuzzyness isn't so much to prevent spoilers as me needing to get a better camera.

Besides the little squiggles having to do with typographical corrections and consistent punctuation, the copyeditor also sent a batch of notes. Most of them were exceedingly useful - like everyone I have a bad tendency to repeat words within paragraphs and pages, and a lot of the dates have been shuffled without being properly double-checked against each other. Other ones... My favorites so far are 'It would be a bit hard to get an entire breast in his mouth, surely?' and 'do roads in the States have a double yellow line up the middle?' 

The notes from the American editor came across while I was halfway through the copyeditor's, so both were dealt with at the same time over a manic four days, because the typesetter needed the finished draft as soon as humanly possible. 

Fast forward to yesterday, and this showed up:

Flat proofs, also two inches thick. These are the same two pages as above, but laid out the way it will look when it's published. I'm a bit in love with the typeface.

This time, instead of working from a list of notes and emailing back my corrections with page and line references, I get to mark up the actual paper with anything (reasonable) I think needs to be changed and mail it back, and a little bit after that a paper-bound copy of the proofs should come winging back.

Fortunately for me, this batch of revisions is a little less urgent: yesterday morning I tried to pick a shirt up off the floor, my lower back went 'I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him,' and now I owe a lifelong debt of gratitude to the doctor at the Reading walk-in clinic for dealing with it compassionately, the NHS for making it free, and my spouse-thing David for all but carrying me there. In the plus column, now I know what diazepam and prescription-strength muscle relaxants feel like, which is something like novocaine only in my brain. In the minus column I am not Hunter S. Thompson, so between the drugs and the fact that there is no position in which it does not feel like the Red Pyramid is ripping out the last foot or so of my spine, I don't foresee anything getting done in the next little while that won't have to be chucked out and done again when I can think clearly.

When I have finished marking up the flat proofs, and the bound proofs come wandering back, they should look a bit like this:

MY BABY HAS A FACE!

I've been keeping the cover to myself since I got it, but now that it's possible to pre-order on Amazon I figure I'm allowed to show it around a little. The above is the UK cover, courtesy of the incomparable Suzanne Dean; the US cover is quite a bit different, though the innards are the same: 

MY BABY HAS TWO FACES!!

This is apparently because the two markets are very different in regards to what kind of covers sell. I'm more than a bit relieved that neither of them involve a tube of lipstick, a stiletto heel, a cosmopolitan glass, or a photograph of half of a woman's face with the gaze directed away from the viewer.

 The US pre-order is here, and the UK pre-order is here; I found out that they existed when my cousin posted them on Facebook about a month ago. I'm still trying to figure out how to keep any relatives or similar individuals whose good opinion I want to retain from seeing them, but that might be a lost cause.  

And now if you will excuse me, there is a sofa with a hot water bottle calling my name.