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.

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.

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.