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.

Winding down

I get resentful every December because all of my non university affiliated friends are celebrating the end of their year. I would get even more resentful right about this time every year as well, because this is when my year is reaching its frantic crescendo and all anyone else seems able to think about is barbecues, except the pollen is so bad that I can't bring myself to care about anything. And I'm not entirely sure that anyone else can either. The offices are empty, administrators aren't answering their phones, my supervisors only exist in theory and everyone I run into on campus looks as though they're either coming off of or about to embark on a multi-day opiate bender. It is a weird time of year, made weirder still by the three-week-long Easter break that is proving nearly impossible to come back from. I went to Reading, but my brain appears to have hitchhiked to the moon, and it is refusing to either return or to focus on anything besides long distance hikes that I haven't gotten to take, varieties of cider I haven't gotten to drink, and inane conversations that I haven't gotten to engage in.

If I'm this much of a useless blobfish, I'm kinda worried about what kind of shape my students are going to be in. Theoretically, they'll be giving me final projects to mark soon, except the prompts for the projects haven't been given out, and the course convenors aren't answering my messages. My professors in undergrad used to vanish to a parallel dimension around this time of year too, so I suppose it might be a universal thing.

This spring, as it happens, marks the halfway point of the enrolment phase of the PhD. I celebrated by trying to convince Dave to let me quit and become a ditch digger. He said no. So I keep promising myself that if I can get through the end of term and PPD training in June and Annual Review without cracking and setting something on fire, I'm going to spend all of July sitting in the summer house at the bottom of Dave's garden, smoking hookah like Carroll's caterpillar and finishing the novel I'm about halfway through drafting, so that Henry will have something to tell me to go redo in the fall.

Front Row

So it turns out that the interview aired on March 31st, a few days before I thought it would - which is how life pretty typically happens to me. It can be found at BBC Radio 4, though I don't know how long it'll stay there. I can promise that at least 80% of what I say is the absolute truth. 

I was a bit surprised at how little of my accent seems to remain, and a bit dismayed at how young I sound. It's still a bit of a shock that my students listen to me at all, let alone make notes like they actually believe what I'm saying. 

So far most of the reviews and responses I've gotten about the book have been positive. Which is not, generally speaking, the sort of response that one receives, much less with a book that is so consistently grim. So I'm going to keep my head down and wait for the other shoe to fall.

Pretending to be a Writer

The Shore was originally going to come out in the first week of the Easter holiday, leaving me time to finish teaching and make my leisurely way down to the general London area before things could start happening. Then the publication date moved, and 'leisurly' turned to 'breakneck': everything has suddenly begun happening at once, and my students are probably wondering if I've been struck with amnesia and wandered off into the hinterlands under the impression that I am really a bunny rabbit. 

The good thing about everything suddenly happening at once is that I don't have enough time to settle comfortably into abject terror; by the time I reach the mild panic stage whatever I'm scared to be doing is already half over. 

Last week I went into London to sign about 600 books for Goldsboro, which was just plain fun, and was interviewed by Kirsty Lang for BBC Radio 4's Front Row, which was only terrifying at the beginning. The terror was well compensated for by being allowed into Broadcasting House, which is one of those experiences I didn't know I was allowed to hope for. 

And last night I got to participate in an "In Conversation" with Catherine Chanter, author of the fantastic novel The Well, at Dulwich Books in London. Being allowed to speak with such a well-read person about something we both love was wonderfully indulgent, and Catherine's allusions to Barthes nearly caused me to spontaneously combust with joy, but I didn't because there was an audience, and one oughtn't to combust in front of an audience that has gathered to hear one speak. Given that public speaking is reportedly the most common human fear, and that writers tend to be solitary by nature, it seems to me that it must have been a uniquely sadistic individual that decided that having writers talk in front of people would be a good idea. I'm quite sure that if I hadn't spent this term teaching I wouldn't have gotten through the evening. It was an almost ideal first event though, and supposedly the more of them I participate in the easier they will be. 

The next be-a-writer-in-public event I get to take part in is the Cambridge Literary Festival, on the 19th of April; since the panel is being run by Ali Smith there is a distinct possibility that I will be struck dumb by the adoration that seems to be common to those people who have had Ali as a teacher in the past. The Front Row interview airs on the third of April, so it's also possible that I will be struck dumb with horror at what my voice actually sounds like.

Reading in Norwich

It's time for me to break my one year plus streak of successfully avoiding public readings - I'm going to be reading at UEA Live on the 19th of March, which is just under a week away. The event is held at Cafe Bar Marzano in the Forum in Norwich and is free to get in - and I can attest from experience that the drinks are good. It kicks off at 7.15 in the evening, but it's the kind of thing that you want to get to reasonably early if you want to sit down - I've had to stand the past three times I've been. 

And in related news: the release date for The Shore has been moved up a week, to (coincidentally) the 19th. Which means that there will be copies for sale at UEA Live. Hey, babies in my family tend to come early. 

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.