Dazed and confused

In the last few days of working on the thesis I went looking through my computer for the master copy of Belief so that I could check a timeline issue, and made the unpleasant discovery that the master copy, thanks to a hiccough in my operating system, no longer existed. Since it was the last few days of working on the thesis I screamed for a little bit and went back to working on the thesis, but after the thesis was done I went around to the computer-type people I know to confirm that, yes, the file had been eaten and, while I still had sections of the novel littering my hard drive that could be pulled together to make up what I'd lost, minus a round or two of revision, there was no way of recovering the actual document that had been lost.

Considering this is the fourth time that such a thing has happened with this novel alone it should no longer surprise anyone that I draft on paper. I'm not sure if this happens to be an especially ill-fated novel, or if I'm having worse luck than usual with electronics. Either way, it's not as much of a total disaster as it could be. Depending on the time of day it's slightly less annoying than the fact that, since moving, I can find none of my socks or sweaters. Though that could be due to still being stuck in the brain-fog that seemed to descend the moment I handed in, which has made everything from spelling to tying my shoes pretty well impossible. The one thing that I haven't been too foggy to do is transcribe, so the moment that I could look at the first draft without feeling sick I started transcribing it. And this afternoon I finished it. Maybe tomorrow my head will be clear enough to start putting what I have in order again.

Marshalling the Forces

Besides writing a thesis, PGR students are supposed to hit a bunch of smaller benchmarks in order to be considered to have successfully finished the program. Some of them are stupid easy, such as earning the requisite professional development credits, which most of us do completely by accident and without plan. Others are more difficult, such as getting an article published in a reputable academic journal, which sounds like it's tough even for the professionals who have been playing this game for years. My personal Waterloo on that front has been finding a conference. I've run into ones on law, politics, education, childhood, but none of them had calls to which I could tailor my critical work enough to have a dream of getting accepted. The thing that made it even more frustrating was that they all seemed to be held places like Hawaii, Mauritius, Japan - the kinds of places that I'd kill to have a legitimate work reason to visit. 

So imagine how ecstatic I was when I finally found a conference for which my work was suited. And imagine how much more ecstatic I was when they actually accepted my paper proposal. 

So, what's the catch?

It's in New Jersey.

Not even old Jersey, but New Jersey, where approximately 80% of my relatives live, where I've been dragged for weddings and christenings since before I was old enough to realise that even the people who live there aren't exactly crazy about the place. No offence to anyone, but I hate New Jersey. I can practically hear the gods laughing. 

Now that I have a place to give a paper, I actually have to write it. They only allow presenters twenty minutes apiece, so it isn't going to be that long, and it is delivered verbally, so the usual rhetorical stylings and five-dollar language goes out the window in favour of clarity and simplicity. You'd think that would make it all easier. For some reason, the mere idea of getting started is terrifying me. Maybe my Everest of secondary sources has something to do with it.

Yes, that is a blackbird. Yes, he is hanging upside down. I don't know why, ask him. 

As things go, the timing is really fantastic. Annual Review has just been, and the major decision made therein was that I'd hand over a full draft of the critical thesis in September. Which means that I need to sequester myself over the summer and write it. And what better way to get into the groove of writing a thesis than by writing a smaller, simpler, more straightforward portion of one of its main arguments? The secondary sources (pictured above; probably overkill) have been gathered, the calendar has been cleared, the outlines have been drawn up. There is absolutely nothing stopping me from hammering out both conference paper and critical thesis.

It probably means a lot that instead of actually beginning the paper, I pulled up a web browser and wrote a blog post. 

Somebody send reinforcements.

Juvenalia

Growing up, my mother stuck to the 'siesta' tradition of her homeland: from about 3 until 5 every afternoon the house was dark and quiet. When I was about 11 I got into the habit of using that time for writing. It was mostly motivated by the fact that there was nothing else I could do in that time besides read, and I didn't like the whiplash feeling of reading for a few hours and then having to return to the real world. I wrote in lined journals, then transcribed them onto a massive PC that ran Windows 95 and had a keyboard that made a satisfying tackety-tackety-tackety sound, then spent a few months revising until I was satisfied enough to painstakingly format, print, cut, and bind the thing into a book neat enough to be lent to my younger siblings. They gave honest reviews, but they read them all. 

When that desktop finally died I copied everything I'd written onto floppy disks, transferred them onto the next computer. When that one died I copied them onto CD-Rs, because floppies weren't a thing any more, and did the same. 

Then, the year before I went to college, my brother managed to fry the motherboard. About that time is when I also got pretty sick, so I remember nothing from then apart from 'your brother fried the motherboard, everything's lost.' I had handwritten copies of about half of it, but I was too preoccupied with trying to get into college to really freak out.

Skip to last week, when I went to go chat with the archivist at the British Archive of Contemporary Writing. They'd heard from Henry that I'd kept my scripts from the MA and still wrote most things longhand, and were interested in borrowing whatever I was up for lending them, and I had a painful memory of the PC from 1996 going into the dumpster. I had also been wishing for a few months that I still had all the research on the Golden Age of Piracy that I'd done for the last novel I wrote before I went off to college, when I was about 19. But I was pretty sure that was all gone, so I didn't think any more of it.

Skip to today, when I went rummaging through my desk looking for a thumb drive to transfer my music from my old computer to my new computer, which I've been putting off doing since April. All of them are from when I started undergrad, and none of them are marked, so I plugged them in one at a time looking for one that had the capacity and functionality for music files. 

And I found a little black 8-gig that must have cost £60 when it was new. And I almost deleted the files unseen because I figured it didn't have anything important on it. Except I flicked through, just to check. And found a folder titled 'Juvenalia.'

I absolutely don't remember making that folder, or transferring my work from the floppies and the CDs onto a computer that had a thumb drive port. But it's all there, including the epic high fantasy novel I wrote when I was nine and thought I had deleted all copies of for the sake of sparing myself intense embarrassment in future. And I am so happy to get it all back.

I don't know if there's any moral to this story, other than 'Hollywood-calibre coincidences do happen in real life.' I'm looking forward to having a comb-through and seeing if any of it is usable, especially the hundred thousand words on piracy. And if all goes well, it will probably wind up in the Archive where anyone who wants to can have a poke-through.

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.

What is a raven like?

The other weekend I was down in the Downs for the Small Wonder festival, and since I was down in the Downs with David in tow we naturally went to visit his mother. And since we were all there it seemed like a good idea to wander around one of the lovely little villages they have at that end of the world and generally poke our noses into things. Which is when I saw this monster:

I had to put my back against the far wall to get the whole thing in frame.

We spent most of the summer working on patching holes in the walls of the junk room so that it could be turned into an office, and it just happened that immediately prior to this trip we'd finally painted, laid a new floor, and had been debating what to do about a worktop. The practical side of me had been reconciled to the idea of Dave building something cheap and wipe clean; the other side desperately wanted something unwieldy and old. So when I saw it in one of the secondhand shops in Lewes, I may have squealed a little. Because, let's face it, no one ever passed down her wipe-clean worktop to her daughter. Wipe-clean worktops just lack something. 

The only problem is my arms aren't quite long enough to reach all those little drawers when I'm sitting down. 

So now I have a desk of more-than-ordinary-spleandour, to paraphrase Kipling, and it happens to be in an office that is finished enough to use, and when I'm done working I can close it up and lock it so that no one can accidentally tidy my outlines into the bin.

And yes, that is a model of Assateague light house on the top.

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.

Home Straight

When I started on Belief (two years ago this month...) Henry made me write an outline for the whole book, so that I'd have some idea where I was going with it all. I don't naturally work from outlines, so while having a general map of where the story is going is somewhat helpful, I've found it doesn't really do much on the day-to-day level, since what happens next usually depends on what just happened and how it happened, and I can't anticipate how I will actually execute a planned scene enough to put it in an outline. So I've gotten in the habit, when I finish my drafting for the day, of outlining the next few scenes on a large post-it note and sticking them on the blank page, so that I'll have an idea of where I should take things when I sit down again. It's a new habit, and it's been working really well for this book, probably because I've had to put it down for weeks at a time to do other things and it's handy to know where I thought I was going when I last left off.

Outlining only as much of the story as I think I'll get around to writing the next time I write does have a drawback: it's felt, for the past six months, as though I will literally never finish this novel. Until about ten minutes ago, when I finished the morning's pages and picked up the post-its, and surprised myself by writing out what is going to happen to take the reader from where I left off to what the big picture outline says is supposed to be the end.

I'm just rolling with the assumption that there's no one alive that can read that.

So it looks like I'm almost done with the first draft of the major part of my thesis, which also happens to be the first draft of my third book. And the little voice in my head chirps up... I turn 27 next week - I wonder if I can get this finished by then?

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...

Little joys

I'm back to drafting the PhD novel at a respectable rate, with the reasonable hope that it will be finished in time for its autumn deadline and Henry won't have to give me that look again. It's getting to the really satisfying all-the-bits-come-together point that sometimes results in entire days being unintentionally devoted to writing. Which means that I've used up a lot of ink. So about a month ago I went online to try and replace my ink, since the only place I've found ink I like in person is in Oxford, and I really needed to lay in some new converters as I have a bad habit of cracking mine. Besides accidentally expanding my pen collection, I also found out that it is possible to buy syringes of the right size to refill cartridges.

If you want to know how I did it before, the answer is 'messily' - given the viscosity of ink, a single drop is too big to fit through the hole in a standard cartridge. 

From there, it was only a matter of time before I realised that this would let me really have fun with mixing my own ink colours. Purists may pitch as many fits as they want, the results are seriously good enough to eat, and nothing I can get pre-mixed. The table is a mess, and all of my handkerchiefs are stained, but it is a wonderfully satisfying little side-hobby. And the manuscript has turned into a rainbow.

To answer the question of why I swap colours so much - swapping pens every page or so keeps my hand from cramping, since they're all slightly different sizes and grips. They all flow differently as well, and some days only certain ones feel right. Is it weird? Probably. Does it let me write for several hours at a stretch without a break? Definitely. Do I have a fountain pen problem? Ask Dave.

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.

Home for the summer

Hope finally glimmers through the clouds - I'm finished in Norwich, barring calamity, until things kick off again in the new term. Which means that this past weekend the incomparable spouse-thing drove up to Norwich, carried my suitcase, books, papers, assorted odds and ends required for daily functioning, assorted groceries that I hadn't had the organisational skills to use up in time, and a rather large potted succulent called Lazarus (due to my failure to kill said plant despite no plant-related skills whatsoever and a larger share than normal of plant-related bad luck) down three flights of stairs, packed it all in the car while leaving sufficient space for me, and hauled the lot the ± three hours to Reading with exceeding good humour. 

The plant that could not be killed

I had thought that by the time I got to be this old I'd be done with the whole student move-out-for-the-summer-move-back-when-school-starts thing. Oh well. 

I still have a paper to write for the Higher Education Practice training course that's kept me in Norwich for so long after the end of term, along with supervisors' marching orders and several inboxes to excavate, but at least I don't have any more train journeys to look forward to for a few months. And around about when the weather started improving (I don't say 'got nice' because it's still pretty dang chilly and wet in Reading for some reason) Dave started getting antsy about finishing all of the around-the-house projects that he was too busy to tackle when he first moved in, and the first of those just happens to be turning the junk room into my office. This could have been accomplished by sticking a desk in the room and calling the job done, but he's still in nesting mode and wants to Do It Right, which means I've learned way more about the composition of a 1960s era council house than I cared to. With any luck the whole thing will be done in the next few weeks and I can stop getting sighed at for scratching the dining room table.

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.

Payoff

The past three weeks or so have been monopolized by marking Writing Texts essays. The process went something like this: 

Retrieve batch of marking from the Hub. Harass Hub staff over pieces of marking that are inexplicably missing from the batch. Read the marking rubric. Read the essays and order them according to quality. Read the marking rubric again. Read the essays again, giving them comments in pencil, and decide on a ballpark grade. Read the marking rubric again. Harass Hub staff again over pieces that are still inexplicably missing. Read the essays again and type up summary comments, even though you know half your students won't read them. Read the marking rubric again. Start from the beginning because you have to integrate the newly-found missing pieces into the batch. Read all the essays again, and give them all number grades. Then read all the essays one more time and adjust the number grades relative to each other so as to be consistent across the batch. Then give the batch to the course convener, who will read all the essays and tell you why your marks are wrong. 

My family insists that no one else is putting in this much effort. Everyone else insists this is the only way to do it. 

I've only just given the Text essays to the convener, which means that I've only just had the chance to face my batch of assessed submissions for Creative Writing. Given the aforementioned process, you can probably guess how I felt pulling the first piece out of the envelope.  

So I want to tell the world: grading my writing students' work is like eating cake with both hands. It's like stepping into the ocean on a hot day. I keep forgetting that I'm not just reading fiction for the sake of reading fiction, and that I need to be writing comments as I go. Their work stuns me. 

So this is what teaching can be like. 

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.

Day of reckoning

This morning, a box came.

BOX!

And inside it were these:

BOOKS!

I'll be off in the corner doing the mad scientist laugh for a little while. 

COLOPHON!

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. 

A Parcel of Penguins.

I was drafting this morning, and I realised that I needed to know the date of the Branch Davidian Massacre in Waco, Texas.

I've already looked up the date of the Waco massacre, and I've written it down. Twice. On the backs of pieces of paper that had important things on their other side. So heaven knows where they are now.

I may have written something important for The Shore on the back of my CAS Letter, which is the sealed and notarised document that gets me into the country.

So I realised that I needed a notebook dedicated to information about this novel, since it involves a lot of this type of minutia.

The notebook I bought, because every time I go to a bookstore I spend twenty minutes looking at them

 I have a thing for notebooks. An obsession. And i figured that this circumstance justified indulging the obsession. So I went to Waterstones especially for a Paper Blank. Because they are pretty and I've wanted one for a while. Which is why I didn't go for a Moleskine, which are like crack to every academic I know - someone gives us the first one as a present and then ever after you can't switch back. I have one I was given by the head of the writing lab for tutoring my sophomore year of undergrad, and it still looks new. After being in my bag when a water bottle exploded. Twice.

So I went for a notebook, and I had a poke around, and I discovered something beautiful.

I have the biggest intellectual crush on this man. 

There are one hundred of them.

Left to right: The Art of War, A Room of One's Own, and the Tao Te Ching.

They each cost less than a double on the rocks. 

I've gone to bookstores in three cities and I still haven't found a copy of A Tale of a Tub: The hunt is on!

And they make me happy - Penguin was originally founded to provide good, cheap reading material for people in transit, way back when all the real literature worth reading was expensive and not pocket sized. So having a copy of Mill on liberty feels like a wonderful return to basics. Though I may have taken to darting into every bookshop I pass in the hope of finding them all.

If all of my books were bound in this format The Luminaries would probably be six inches thick.

Oh, and look what wandered over my doorstep today:

There was one thing that surprised me upon finally seeing these two side by side:

See it? Seeeee it?

There's a half inch difference in the thickness of these two books. I measured. And it isn't because Twilight has large print and wide margins. Quite the opposite, actually.

Stars on the left, Twilight on the right

For some reason, I expected Stars to be more substantial. And Twilight to be quite a bit less substantial. Huh. So far, the only comparison I can draw is that one's got a handily short title, while the other is a pain to type over and over again. That should soon be remedied by the four hour train journey to Reading that's coming up later this week. I don't know whether I'm apprehensive or excited.

Conversation with my supervisor

H: "The voice is working, but the novel so far shies away from intimacy."

S: "So I need more...intimacy?"

H: "Exactly."

S: "Does that mean that I should write a scene where they have sex?"

H: "Not exactly."

S: "But sex would fix the intimacy problem, wouldn't it?"

H: "Well, that's one way to fix it."

S: "They're both from incredibly repressed backgrounds; if they have sex they'd probably die from guilt."

H: "Still. Intimacy."

S: "Right. I'll think about it."


~Later that day, while meeting with the other degree candidates~

A: "What are you doing tonight?"
S: "Drinking whisky and writing sex for Henry."
A: "...That sounds wrong on so many levels."

Big secret: Everyone's already had the Big Serious Earth-shattering conversations, and I'm probably not going to revolutionize the novel through my supervision discussions. But they certainly make me do things I wouldn't do otherwise.

In other news, my critical supervisor suddenly adores the three thesis chapters I've given her, and I submit for my upgrade in a few weeks. So, yay return of sanity, however fleetingly you may grace me with your divine presence!