Suddenly I need an accountant

On Friday my agent and I finished revisions of my book and she sent it out - I adore her for that alone, I hate writing pitch letters. The expectation was to sit tight for a few weeks, let everyone read and get back to us, and have a leisurely discussion about offers with anyone that wanted to make an offer. So I was sitting at my desk last night, drinking rum and trying to figure out PhD course requirements when my agent got a phone call. And then called me. And Business happened. And now my book has a publisher.

It's probably a good thing that I was drinking rum; I'm so uptight normally that if I hadn't been we would still be weighing the pros and cons.

I'm not sure how to react, other than be suddenly nervous that the IRS will come swooping in before I figure out the tax regulations that apply to students living abroad. And I'm not sure how to tell people without it sounding like bragging. Though I do have to be smug, just a little, about one thing - the undergrad professor that I asked about publication at the end of senior year told me that I'd never get this specific book published, and there was no way I'd manage to get any book published within five years of graduating, so I shouldn't try before I turned 30. Well, someone just offered a pre-empt for this book, I graduated 16 months ago, and I'm just a month shy of 25.

"There really is no joy in life greater than doing those things that people say you cannot do." At this point, almost everything I've done in the past two years I've been told beforehand that I'd never do it, so sit down, hush up, and stop being a nuisance. I don't need them to know they were wrong, I can pretty much guarantee that none of the people that told me not to try remember those conversations now. But it feels good to know that my faith in myself wasn't completely misplaced.

Metaphysical bullshit

Recently I got word that one of my Writing professors from undergrad had retired. Actually, I was poking around on Facebook and saw that my honors advisor found a copy of her own honors project while cleaning out his office, and had gotten all misty-eyed about the time he was her advisor (our English department was a mite academically incestuous; they kept it in the family) and I at first guessed that he'd kicked it. I only used 'kicked it' there because he didn't; he'd finally retired and, I assume, taken off to revisit the peyote fields of his misspent youth. Yes, he was that kind of professor.

He cultivated the reputation of an 'asshole;' with the ' 's because that's what he called himself in relation to his students, rather than what we called him. We loved him, and we hated him, and we loved to hate him and hated that we loved him. His main line of intellectual inquiry was what we called 'metaphysical bullshit,' which included the subtexts that never worked when they were consciously included but always seemed to pop up when we least expected them. It was the kind of thing that lead to trippy notes - his were the classes I always brought vodka to, and not only because they were three hours long.

So, statute of limitations be blown, here's some of the stuff I got from him. In installments. If I couldn't take three hours of it sober, I have no business inflicting great chunks on anyone.

“The imagination is a force of nature.” Trust in what comes to you, take a line of thought and run with it. Don’t cripple a narrative by imposing on it the limits you think it should have or that other writers would give it. Follow the narrative to the very end; let it go where it wants to go rather than where you want it to go. Allow the story to have its own integrity. It doesn’t matter if the story you write doesn’t turn out to be the story you thought you were going to write, the story you have written should have its own integrity, and you are free to return to the initial idea, the trigger, and write again. Observe. Remember. Steal other peoples’ gossip. Gather in the details that surround you and pack them into your narrative. The way a person walks, the flavor of sunlight or the smell of purple. Look at the world sideways. Give your readers descriptions that make them say “I’ve never seen it that way” and “that’s exactly how it is” all at once.

           Voice can take you far, no matter what person you write in. It lets you get deep down, put on the skin of the character, sink inside her head and take on her motivation. It needs to be authentic, it needs to ring true. Every line should be examined with the question, “is this what this character would say, the way this character would say it?” It’s too easy to have all our characters sound the same, or sound like us, or sound like our best friend. They don’t need to be completely at odds, just distinct. Work the voice, use it to convey something about the character, use it as a tool for character development, plot exposition, a means of adding complexity.

Yet another anthology

I give you the anthology of the UEA Masters in Creative Writing. I don't think any of us are proud of what we sent in for it, but it exists, and can be bought somewhere, theoretically speaking.

So I read in a book one time...

One of the fun things about teen and young adult books is that graphic sexuality tends to not be allowed - or wasn't when I was in that age range; things may have changed recently. But some of the sexiest books I've ever read were aimed at that audience. This could just be due to a flawed sample group, but I've found that where most adult-aimed books would have a 'and then they boned' scene, teen and tween books would play and flirt around with the events, often stopping short of what most people consider sex. Kissing could be the most risque thing in the entire book, but would be handled in such a way that it was several peppers hotter than the more hardcore material.

There's a scene from a YA mystery novel that's gotten stuck in my head, more for its 'huh?' qualities than for any of the aforementioned eroticism. Victorian London, the reader is looking through a window into a bedroom containing a fourteen or fifteen year old girl in a bride's gown and a much much older man of the creeptastic leery variety. Older man proceeds to tear open a pomegranate, squash the seeds one by one against her delicate foot, and suck the dripping juice from her skin.

Admit it, the first thing you think when you see this is "I wonder how I can use this in a kinky sexual adventure?"

The first thing I thought, after reading that, was "this man has never eaten a pomegranate." Ok, the first thing I thought was, "What the hell, Mr. Pullman?" I think the book was by Pullman; either way, 'what the hell' tended and tends to be my first reaction to most of his work.

So skip ahead a couple of years. Dave goes up the road to post a letter, and comes back with a pomegranate, because he has poor impulse control when it comes to food and the Indian grocery shops up Wokingham Road are fantastic. Fruit of the dead gets ripped open on the table, we start crunching seeds, and I remember that scene. He wouldn't let me squash them on his feet, but I did take a seed and try to crush it against the bony part of his hand. And, much to my surprise, it popped. And the juice dripped. And it actually did work like in the weird scene in the book, and I had the weird urge to do it again, because tiny little explosions that go crunch and get red juice all over Dave's glasses are wonderful and addictive.

All this is a really long way of explaining why I - and a lot of people I know and work with - are so anal about details. People may remember the wonderful plot and characterization, but they're more likely to continue to be annoyed about that one bit you got wrong long after they've forgotten your name. (I still haven't forgiven someone I read in Senior Seminar of undergrad for putting Mount Etna in Greece.) Also, I wonder how Pullman knew that pom seeds go crunch in that way, because that's totally not something you'd assume from eating them.

Still Alive

One of my worst nightmares came true over the summer: the day I was supposed to fly back to London from the Southampton Writer's Conference, I went to the hospital instead.

I don't know why, but every time I travel somewhere I go with this semi-conscious paranoia that something will keep me from getting back to the place that I'm supposed to be; now that 'the place I'm supposed to be' happens to be a country where I don't have citizenship, the paranoia has gotten worse. It doesn't matter that my apartment, my school, and most of my life is in Norwich, if Border Control says they aren't letting me in there isn't much I can do. So going to the E.R. instead of JFK, though not quite as bad as having entry denied and being put on the first plane back to the US, is pretty far up there on my list of 'things I get worried about when I can't sleep.'

I did get back to England, after chilling for a week on a creepily empty campus and crying at British Airways when they refused to take my discharge papers as proof that I'd been in the E.R., but the experience has made me really glad that I'm going to be too broke to travel much for the rest of my degree.

The Masters dissertation is getting done, but its 15,000 words are paling in comparison to the 100,000 plus word behemoth that my first novel is turning into. Interesting to note, when you hit 100k, MS word stops giving you a word count at the bottom of the screen and just provides a page count; even the computer gives up at that point. It should be through the final edits and going out as a submission by the end of the month, but right now it tracks me in my sleep and has made me a horrible girlfriend, sister, daughter, and all-round relational individual.

Real reflections on writing to follow when I get my brain back.

Biting off more than I can chew.

Right now I'm on Long Island, at the Southampton Writer's Conference. Which, I have to admit, I was not as excited for as I should have been, because after seven solid years of workshops it's hard to get keyed up for yet another workshop. Except the entire conference is excellent, and Alan Alda is here, which becomes more relevant if you know that I had elaborate plans to kidnap him when I was fifteen and first found M*A*S*H at my local library. So good workshop, good lectures, good god my high-school celebrity crush is presenting on the importance of accessible and engaging science writing.

It's been a weird summer, which began with the utterly unexpected acquisition (if you can call it that) of an agent and a frantic exodus from Norwich. Then my sister came to be dragged through London, Paris, and assorted bits of the English countryside. Then I went to find my brother in Berlin and succeeded in not killing him while we kicked around, then I flew back to London so I could fly to New York for the conference, and now I am on Long Island, still jetlagged with stress hives, dragging along with me the draft of my dissertation, the draft of my novel with a double-weight of agent's line notes, and the visa paperwork that needs to be filled out and sent in sometime before my current visa expires. So that's where I have been, and hopefully at the end of it there will be a bed, and the time to finish the masses of work that have accrued over the time on the road. And, if I am luck, enough peace for the hives to clear up.

At least I'm not afraid of flying any more.

Live the cliche!

Somewhere between computers becoming widely available and computers becoming easily portable, a lot of people switched over to doing their drafting on a word processor. Which makes sense; it's easier to type fast than to write fast, easier to make changes and save versions, and if your handwriting is a nightmare then it's hard to imagine why you'd want to go back to pen and paper - or pencil and paper, if you've got a thing against ink.

We've still got that fun little cliche image, though: misunderstood writer in the dark corner of the cafe, overpriced drink at their elbow, scribbling at the leather-bound notebook with a real fountain pen. Or typing away at a high-end laptop. 

And I'm ashamed to say that I'm often that cliche. And ashamed to be that cliche, but I haven't found anything that works better.

Pictured: dissertation. Also novel. Also indulgence in irrational craving for blank books.

Computers are beautiful things. I usually draft short stories right into my laptop; with the amount of fact-checking they usually require and the word count limitations they usually have, it just makes sense to pound it all out in word. Novels, on the other hand, are a whole different bag.

When I've got to stick within a word count I like having that little changing number at the bottom of the screen. When I'm going long, it suddenly becomes my enemy. Keeping up momentum is hard enough without having it thrown in my face how far I am from the end every time I sit down to work. And that makes internet procrastination even more irresistible. Which leads to no work getting done. And when you're going on the road for a while, a laptop can get really heavy really fast.

I can't be the only person out there that loves a notebook full of writing.

So I've become the cliche. Technically, I'm not supposed to drink coffee any more, but you don't tell a woman that's run a cafe no more espresso, so I'm only allowed to drink it while I'm working. The notebooks cost pocket change, weigh almost nothing, get taken everywhere and are usually added to in those slack moments when trains are late or professors are late or I'm stuck waiting around. Being a stats junkie, I know that five pages of my writing is about one thousand words, so I can get a word count when I really want, but mostly I just pick up where I left off. And since I can't really go back and waste time tweaking things instead of actually writing, the book gets closer to the end with every Americano I drink. And I'm surprised to find that it is possible to train oneself to be inspired on demand, to produce good work on a schedule. 

Or, as Faulkner so aptly put it, "I only write when I'm inspired. Fortunately I'm inspired at 9 o'clock every morning."