Flight and The Fiddlehead

About a decade ago, when I first found out that the literary magazines I nicked from the library and read samples from online accepted submissions from pretty much anyone, I made a hit list of the magazines where I most desperately wanted to be published one day. In the top three was The Fiddlehead, Canada's longest living journal. Given its reputation I figured I had not a chance but continued submitting anyway, since regular rejection letters are like strength training for the soul.

So I am pretty well ecstatic to say that "Flight," one of the pieces that was cut from the final edit of The Shore, appears in the Winter 2016 issue.

This issue, in fact.

"Flight" was one of my favourite stories. It was probably the most difficult to write and definitely took the most research - it involves rockets, NASA, and the 1950s - but since it's about an outsider coming to the Shore for the first time, and since the book was more than a little over length until the bitter end, it fell prey to the red pen. The book mostly focuses on one family, and this was one of the few pieces that could be taken out without disturbing the threads that connected all the rest.

But that doesn't matter now, because rather than languishing in a desk drawer the story is snugged up in an issue of a magazine in which I thought I'd never be good enough to have a place. And just in case the prospect of getting another nibble of the islands and the ponies isn't enough to tempt you over to The Fiddlehead's website for a copy of the issue, here's a glance at the opening:

It's probably time to invest in a new camera...

Paperback

I poke my nose above the drift of books and papers to say that, after having moved around quite a bit, the UK release date for the paperback edition of The Shore is February 25th! Though they lack the bludgeoning capabilities of hardback, I've always had a soft spot for softcover books - they seem more tactile, and they tend to be easier to lug around. A hardback belongs on the shelf where it can look impressive, a paperback belongs in the hand. And I always feel like I've committed a crime when my hardcover books get mussed, while the softcovers need the mussing to feel broken in and comfortable.

The US release date shouldn't be far behind, but I'm blowed if I can figure out when it is. My guess is that it will also move around a bit and then leap out when no one suspects - as so much in publishing seems to do.

On the topic of things leaping out unexpected: I've gotten back into the horrible habit of inbox watching, because any minute now either or both of my editors will send through their final stack of notes for The Lauras. Until that happens I'm stuck plodding responsibly on with postgraduate work, which wouldn't be that bad except I know that the moment that I start enjoying it the edits will come and I'll have to abandon censorship for the sake of finishing the book on time. I'm a bit tempted to get some chalk and the Harry Potter books and see if I can bastardise a spell into summoning edits in my kitchen - I was never allowed to read Harry Potter because it apparently taught you how to do magic, but given the time crunch I'm pretty sure a little magic would be more than justified.

The wreck's progress

About a week ago, as I was toddling back up to Norwich, I realised how many days weren't left in January. But my sense of time is rather bad, so I didn't start seriously fretting until I got the email from Jason that essentially ran, 'It's the last week of the month... where's the book?' At which point literally everything else was dropped, and anything that couldn't be dropped I brought my computer along to so that I could tweak lines during slack moments. So on Friday at half two in the afternoon, while sitting in the postgrad bar, I found myself unexpectedly at the end once again. And I sent the new draft off to Jason before I could talk myself into messing with it some more. And then I walked home feeling like my arm had dropped off, because it's been the only thing I've thought about in the past month and suddenly not needing to think about it felt wrong.

And then I got sick again. 

I've always spent term time getting whatever was going around, but this year's been a little ridiculous.  It's gotten to the point that I grab cold medicine every time I get groceries, because I know it'll be used. 

Between having finished a major project and spending the weekend being useless and miserable, I figured a reward was in order. So I went to the children's section of the uni library (we have a children's section; it is excellent) and had a poke around. And found this:

My love for this book and the age when I first read it probably explains a lot. 

When I was nearly nine my parents moved us from a tiny house right down the street from my aunt to a much bigger house in the county where most of the dying in the American Civil War took place, and where everyone I met was (is) still obsessed with it. 

I hated it. 

The only redeeming feature of the place was the size and quality of its library system. My sister was born weeks after the move, so no one paid much attention to what I was getting out. So the first (and for a while, the only) thing that made me happy in that place was Joan Aiken's books. After a while I began branching out, but I still vividly remember sitting on the cold kitchen floor on a blazing June afternoon, all the lights off and no one making a sound because Dinky and Mom were asleep, reading Blackhearts on Battersea as slowly as I could because it was almost over and I didn't want to come back to reality. They were the books that first made me want to see England - and now that I have seen England they're more than overdue for a re-read.

The cover's different from the one I first read, but the illustrations are the same!

And on the subject of books: when I got back a heap of them were waiting for me, because I'd had the presence of mind to do all of my overseas ordering before I left for Christmas. There are some good ones that I've been looking for for a while, but my favourite by far is:

Answer: it depends on whether or not you consider teaching your kids critical thinking to be 'harming' them. 

I'm still useless and miserable, but the next book is one step closer to done. Next should come line notes, then copyeditor's notes and page proofs, then a bound proof, then it's all over but the shouting. And when I think of it that way, August doesn't seem far away at all. 

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.

Revision and paperback

I've been eaten by revisions. Which is preferable to being eaten by my thesis; at least my editor gives positive feedback. Last Monday I sat down and rewrote the first thirty pages. On Tuesday I realised that the rewrite was crap and re-rewrote the first thirty pages. On Wednesday I woke up with the conviction that the version from a year ago was actually much better than I first thought and used it to rewrite the re-rewrite. This weekend Dave went down to Brighton and I stayed home and did my night-owl thing and managed to hit the halfway point.

Behold: the editorial notes. Though about two pages of that is notes to self. 

 People have said that the reason it's called 'revision' is that it's a process of re-seeing, more than rewriting. You have to see what's on the page with clear eyes before you can know what it needs to make it better. In my case it's more a process of re-digesting; now that I've gotten to the midpoint the little voice in my head keeps chiming in with comments like 'you know, what you really need to do to chapter 2 is...' And then I have to go back to chapter 2, which does usually make chapter 2 better but makes the whole longer, which is a problem in its own right because the whole needs to lose about twenty thousand words of deadweight before it can be called finished.

About the point last week where I was despairing of ever getting to page 31, I got a surprise through the mail slot:

It has spot gloss

And creepy people

I've got a weakness for book-related art. It's not so common to find people's impression of a book transmuted into another form, and seeing how someone else would present my work visually makes me as excited as the existence of the physical book does. Which is a level of excited that is pretty difficult to touch; I've got a weakness for paperbacks.

The innards have been dressed up, too!

Office!

Last April Dave and I started fixing up one of the back bedrooms with the ultimate hope that it would be turned into an office so I could stop cluttering up the dining room table and Dave could stop throwing away my notes by accident. There were holes in the walls the size of my torso, and the floor wasn't level, so we figured it wouldn't be easy. Then we found out that the entire back half of the house was a not-quite-legal addition, done in the middle of the night by a previous owner, presumably while under the influence of something illegal.

The only straight lines in that picture are the books. 

The room contains not a single ninety degree angle. The walls bow. The ceiling bows. The floor ripples. Neither the ceiling nor the floor actually meets the walls. The skirting boards were hung using adhesive AND six inch nails, like they were possessed and in danger of flying off the wall during the full moon.

The coffee cup on the desk in both pictures should give you an idea of how big the room is('nt).

Which is why, when I finished putting the sealant around the seams on the new skirting board at the end of December and Dave said "I promise I'll paint the trim as soon as it gets warm," I said, "Forget it, it's done."

Lazarus has been installed on the windowsill; of course it's done.

To my surprise, it's suddenly so much easier to get work done. Possibly because when I close the door with me in the office the dirty dishes stop existing, and when I close the door with me outside the office the work stops existing. Maybe the door is magic. Or maybe I should remember what I know about how human beings work and quit being surprised by psychology.

 All the breakables got moved up here last week so they wouldn't fall victim to New Year's Eve, most notably Dave's collection of resin dragons. At first I was worried they'd crowd the books - so far we've only moved in the ones that were sitting in literal piles in corners of other rooms, languishing for lack of shelf space - but they're starting to grow on me.
 

Two of about a dozen. They add something... I wouldn't say 'menace,' but then again, I wouldn't not say 'menace.'

Notes

On the absolute last day in 2015 before I completely gave up and surrendered to Christmas, family, and what is starting to look like a chronic respiratory infection, I toddled into London to see Jason. It was one of the more entertaining trips: the man seated next to me on the Tube was reading appallingly unedited erotica in eighteen-point font on the largest tablet known to humanity (the word 'panties' was used without a touch of irony, and the wrong 'their' and 'to' was used repeatedly.  (I read far too fast for my own good.)) and I got to the Random House office just in time to get a good seat in the lobby to watch as a pair of uniformed Metropolitan Police wandered in and asked to speak to the person who had phoned about receiving a bomb threat (Said threat came in the form of a letter, because publishing is apparently nothing if not completely civil at even the worst of times.).

The next draft of the nameless novel is due at the end of January, and rather than go back and forth by phone and email and muddle through tracked changes and misinterpret written instruction and get everything confused, someone (it may have been me, I don't remember) decided that the best way to get to understandable, executable editorial notes was for me to sit down with Jason and talk through everything that either of us thought might need addressing. This was much more enjoyable than one might expect, since there are several things about the current draft that I'm not crazy about and wanted to figure out just how much bending someone else thought they might be able to take, as well as several parts that are not as bad as I thought.

And now that it's the first day of 2016 on which I can reasonably expect to get work done it's time to take the pages of notes I wrote during that meeting out and see what can be done with the book. Which, despite our having talked about it as much as anyone can a work in progress without completely killing it, still doesn't seem to have a final title. The two at the top of the list at the moment are In Passing and The Lauras, but I'm expecting to hear from Jason at any minute that he's changed his mind. Not only is it difficult to talk about a book with no title, but the cover artist can't get started with her design until the name of the thing is nailed down, so it would be nice to have the name pinned firmly down. Given the fact the publication date is less than nine months away, I'm starting to wonder if it's possible for a book to go forth into the world nameless and come to anything but misfortune.