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."

One of those moments

My boyfriend was looking over my shoulder while I was working the other day and came out with, "That's clever! Your blog title is an allusion to 'An Idiot Abroad,' isn't it?"

Apparently he'd never heard of Twain's book. It's a good thing he's pretty.

Dissertation Period

On the calendar it looks like a lovely blank block that one can fill with all one's heart desires. In actuality it consists of meetings and stomach acid. Lots of stomach acid.

Even though nothing else is due until the beginning of September, we are supposed to be drafting our dissertations. And to make sure that we actually are drafting our dissertations, we have dissertation supervision meetings until everyone breaks up for the summer. After the second week of June or so we're on our own, presumably to finish that dissertation while not abusing our livers too much. I don't know how everyone else's meetings have gone, but mine usually follow a cycle similar to that of the workshop: A few days of buoyancy and drafting, the handing in followed by a few days of utter lazyness because there's no point in doing new work if you're going to change it all in light of anticipated feedback, the meeting in which your spirits sink lower and lower as your supervisor points out everything that's wrong with your piece, a day or two of despondency as you wonder if you're really cut out for this, then the intrepid return to the blue-soaked page to see if there's anything salvageable. In my case, the greatest relief is that the finished piece is only allowed to be 15k words, and is not expected to have a completed narrative arc but rather be the three chapter pitch for a novel; I keep thinking about it in relation to my 90k word undergrad dissertation and then try not to laugh when we're given generalized advice about pacing ourselves and not getting overwhelmed by the word-count.

There are also weekly seminars on research methodologies, which we are regularly reminded are mandatory but for which no one ever takes attendance, which have consisted so far of powerpoints with blocks of text and no pictures, professors reading aloud from their own blogs, and random anecdotes, so as the weeks have progressed it's become much easier to find a seat.

After the research seminars we are allowed to catch up with each other for an hour before getting to meet assorted agents and publishers out of their native habitats, where they answer questions and give general advice. Then we get to chat with them while consuming free wine, hopefully getting loose enough in the process to pitch our half-finished books. We all seem to agree that the agent bit is the best bit so far, as they are generally helpful and friendly, and when they aren't we have free wine and each other.

Also, it looks like I'll still be around next year: I've been offered a place on the PhD, and since I don't have a share in all that student debt that everyone else in my generation is suffering under, I've taken them up on it. It feels less like having been accepted and more like being engulfed, as if I were a food source for amoebae, but I'll take my research opportunities no matter how they are offered. Though the next STEM student who says that of course I've been given funding because everyone gets funding no matter how insignificant their possible conclusions will be throttled.