Running away from home

I suppose one of the good things about not being given an office is that there's no place for a supervisor to poke their head into to make sure you're still working. As long as I make deadlines and act industrious and slightly overwhelmed, they don't think to ask where I am during the week. So at the beginning of this month I ran away from home.

Usually I stay in Norfolk, make a day trip out of a section of footpath, get lost and rained on and chased by cows and come home to my own bed. This time I went to Cardiff.

I'm sure there was some logic involved in choosing Cardiff as the place to run away to. The train tickets were cheap, and I start acting a little crazy if I go too long without seeing the ocean. As luck would have it, I happened to be there for St. David's Day. Which meant that there were Welshcakes.

I did other things, too: explored the arcades and the covered market, gawked at the taxidermy in the museum, poked my head into all of the public buildings, slipped into the castle for free during the parade and walked all the way around Cardiff Bay by accident. But the Welshcakes were the highlight. They were being sold hot from the bakestones in paper bags, doused in caster sugar and (I can only assume) cocaine. At first I got two, thinking I'd be good with a taste to see what they were like. Then I got another bag. And then another. And now my coat pockets have a sugar crust in the corners.

I took my notebook and actually got some drafting done, so I suppose I can call it a work trip. I don't think anyone noticed that I was gone, least of all my supervisors. So maybe not having an office does have some positive qualities.

Begging

I remember the initial application to the PhD as being quite similar to the adrenal function test I had last year - it was incredibly uncomfortable, lots of blood was drawn, and no one gave me fair warning as to what I was expected to do. So by contrast, the application for funding that I wrote this year has already been a raving success.

The project has had a general shape for a while - in my head. The bibliography has been added to haphazardly as my supervisors told me to go read things, and the novel has wiggled around in its larval stage, with sticky notes marking the passages that I need to fact check when I find the inclination.

Then the funding application was due.

You can't be vague when you're asking people for money.

In the two weeks that it took me to write the proposal I went from having vague ideas as to what I was doing to having a battle plan. There are stages. And footnotes. And self-imposed deadlines. Even if they don't fund me, the proposal was worth writing because I now know exactly what I am doing and exactly what needs to come next. Unfortunately, the actual work has been semi-derailed by the impending Upgrade Panel, which is essentially a mini viva in which you convince a gaggle of professors that you're progressing well and are generally fit to continue. If you pass, they leave you alone to get on with it, which is what I really want.

The upgrade is supposed to take place at the end of May, so I'm detouring from the actual next step of the project (which involves school board records, spread sheets, and quietly learning how to use Excel without anyone realizing that I have no idea how it works) and skipping ahead to produce a section of edited novel and a chunk of write-up so they can cross-examine me on their content and assure themselves that I'm competent to be allowed to keep at it.

Henry gets to see a decent-sized bit of the novel draft for the first time next week. Somehow I've made twenty thousand words of it happen, and every word has drawn blood. It's too sad. It's too personal. It cuts too deep. Which probably means that he'll tell me to go and torture my characters a bit more.

Pretty dang anticlimactic

I sat down at my desk this morning to get some drafting done. Pen, notebook, coffee, spare ink cartridges, the usual thing. And I decided to just keep going until I couldn't any more, because I haven't been getting around to drafting much since coming back to Norwich. And, much to my surprise, I finished the novel.

Cleaning off the desk, incidentally, was a contributing factor to 'not getting around to drafting much.'

Specifically, it's the novel that Ali Smith told me to go and write when I spoke with her in February of last year. Starting it was terrifying, as I hadn't written a novel since before starting uni and learning how to think in short story form - how do you fluff out a narrative that much? Somewhere in there (possibly around the end of the second black notebook) it stopped being intimidating. And I wish having written the last sentence felt momentous. But it doesn't, because all I've done is finally transcribe the end of a story I've already told myself over and over in different ways; the big payoff is that it's no longer cluttering up my head and I can think about other things. Like the degree I'm supposed to be getting.

Maybe being handed a bound proof copy of The Shore later this year will feel more like completion is supposed to.

It is 390 pages long, a bit over 100,000 words, drafted in at least nine different colors of ink (I'm easily entertained) and took six months of actual working time (most of the summer was spent skiving off and revising The Shore) and only four litres of gin. I'm not sure how much it weighs, but the notebooks were far easier to lug around than my computer, and also less prone to crashing, drop damage, and opportunistic theft. It's also quite easy to keep people from having a casual read, as I'm not letting those notebooks off my desk until they're transcribed and I doubt anyone can really read my handwriting.

This one, incidentally, also contains sex, drugs, and violence, but significantly less of all three than the previous book. It also has a single, consistent narrator, which is something most people seem to like. And now there's nothing to keep me from working on the degree novel except my crippling fear of failure and my advisor's insistence that I read books that make me cry.

I am a serious student; please do not bend, fold, stamp, or staple me.

The end of January - and the uni's grant application deadline - is rolling towards me in a threatening manner much reminiscent of storm waves on the beach before I learned to swim. The PhD has been on for about three months, but the general consensus is that it feels more like three years. Which is a bit tough, as the academic year is really only just getting rolling.

That's the one thing I don't like about academics: for everyone else, December 31st is the end of the year, a time to evaluate, drink too much, and generally relax. For those of us attached to the universities the year is only just begun, and any stab at celebrating the holidays the way the rest of the family wants you to celebrate means ignoring deadlines, ignoring responsibilities, and not feeling guilty when you mark your advisor's e-mails as 'read later.' 

Over the break I read two Phillip Roth novels: American Pastoral and Sabbath's Theater. Both made me want to stab myself in the face while simultaneously raising my standards for prose so high that I will never be able to read crime fiction again. I thought I could not hate anyone more than I hated Roth. Then I tried reading Saul Bellows. 

Roth isn't so bad, all things considered. 

I also got to hold a baby of more than usual cuteness, which made my biological clock go 'clink, clunk, go adopt a kitten' in a worrying way. And I read a bunch of fiction that was extremely relevant to my project but involved so much death that somewhere in the third week of break I found myself sobbing intermittently while ranting to bare acquaintances about how some hacks shamelessly play with readers' emotions. And I started the novel. And I narrowed down what my critical project will be about. And I made Dave eat massive amounts of pseudo-Mexican food, because going home made me miss rice and beans and there is no way to make one-person batches of pseudo-Mexican food unless you're making box enchiladas, and box enchiladas are just sad. 

So maybe I did get something done over break.

Is it obvious that I'm just avoiding writing the grant proposal?

Maybe I'm avoiding writing the grant proposal. 

Abstinence-only education

The Big Adult thing I've done so far this month is start the eternal quest to nail down my tax responsibilities. This so far has included chasing down accountants in two countries and getting my hands on an application for a National Insurance Number, which is the thing that lets you pay taxes to the English government instead of going to prison for tax evasion.

When I did the BA, there were several classes specifically for students that wanted to become writers, taught by professors that were themselves (to a certain point) writers. And between discussions of plot and point of view, students would inevitably have questions about the professional side of things. How do you get an agent? How do you get a short story published? How do you write a cover letter? The standard brush-off then was, "You don't need to know that yet."

The MA addressed our curiosity a bit more directly: One hour-long class was devoted to a cursory look at account keeping, finding an agent, that sort of thing. A copy of one of the professor's contracts, with the inappropriate bits covered up with thick black censor bars, was handed out as an example of something that we didn't need to fully understand yet. The agent and publisher meetings - there were six of them, each an hour long - were a bit more helpful, but they only went over what an agent or publisher does and how to find one. Everything after that point was a hazy terra incognita that we would find out about when we needed to know about it - the way it was phrased made it sound as if, the moment we signed a contract, we would instantaneously and magically understand everything pertinent to being a professional writer.

A month or so ago I signed my contract. I made sure my publisher bought me dinner first. It was a very nice dinner. I've never been on an actual date, so I can't compare, but if I were going to go on a date I would want it to be half as nice as that dinner. And now, unexpectedly and far younger than I was told to expect to, I have reached that 'later' that all of my professors told me that I needed to wait until before I worried about the technical stuff.  Not knowing isn't going to make me not responsible for making sure the right countries get their cut on time. Which makes me wonder, did they think that if they didn't tell me how to deal with this that it would prevent me from ever needing to find out?

Finish line in sight

Yesterday I hit 98,000 words on the current novel. Which is about 13,000 words farther than I thought it would go, and I still have a handful of plot points that have to be included before we can hit the diminuendo and the "Good Night, Gracie!" And while it's easy to open it up and keep on going, I'm really wishing that it were finished already, because it's so easy to just open it up and keep on going.

I hate beginning, and I hate beginnings, and I hate wasting ink on the twenty thousand or so words of drain circling that it takes me to find the voice I'm looking for. And when I'm back at the beginning again, it's hard to remember that the beginning will ever be anything but shit. Which is why having something that's been almost done for a few months now is really dangerous: it's just easier to keep going with the really familiar, comfortable plot and characters than to do the research or write the opening of any of the things I'm actually supposed to be writing. Like the PhD novel that Henry thinks I'm already well into. Or the novel for Crime Fiction that Henry thinks I'm already well into. Or really, anything that can be slid in under the heading "things that my supervisor thinks that I'm working on."

The fact that it's 98,000 words without being done, by the way, is Exhibit A in the ongoing discussion of why I don't do NaNoWriMo. It's a discussion because everyone I know does it, and everyone I know that does it turns into a proselytizer when I say that I never have and probably won't. And the numbers are the 'why.'

On a day that I get absolutely nothing done, including putting on clothes, I draft 1,500 words. When I have something to avoid doing, can't sleep, or get really into it, it's more, but on the worst day it will be a solid 1,500; math it out, that's at least 45,000 a month. The goal of NaNoWriMo is a 50,000 word novel in 30 days; even when I was writing them out in Marble composition books, I haven't written a novel that ended in 50,000 words. I could double it up and maybe get out a complete novel in the alloted time, but I'd be pretty well cooked for the next few months, and nothing else would get done. Or I could call it finished at 50k and never mind that the story is only half done. But a novel is a novel and the goal of the exercise is to write a novel in a month while creating the habit of writing every day. It's a great idea and a fun exercise and brings people together into a support network, but it isn't really something I need right now. It's not that I can't find the time, just that I've found something that works better for me.

Now if only this bastard would complete so I could move onto something with an actual deadline...

To London, to London, jiggity-jig

I keep winding up in London, unintentionally, for purposes that are not entirely work-related. Not that I'm complaining.

Monday was a double-barreled trip, in that I had the early afternoon to find an accountant - my housemate says 'find' is the wrong verb, because they don't grow like mushrooms in the forest to be picked willy-nilly by passersby, but what does he know - and the evening to find a particular little subterranean bar in Soho where Windmill was throwing wine at its 2014 novelists. Neither of which are particularly daunting, unless you feel like an impostor and keep expecting someone to send you to play with the finger-paints until nap time.

"Finding an accountant" consisted of getting lost in a dodgier-looking part of Camden for a good half-hour, then having the reincarnation of Winston Churchill repeatedly explain that I need a national insurance number and everything I spend money on regularly is tax deductible. My family keeps trying to pass me on to accountants that they know socially, but the one thing that the professors at the UEA have not hedged on recommending is finding someone that specializes in writers and other creatives that are horrible at numbers - while I was sitting in the reception area, a woman wearing an expensive wool birds nest as a dress came in and left two shopping bags full of receipts and other papers and said, "see you next quarter!" while walking out.

And the Windmill Party - publishers, publicists, sales people, agents, Waterstones representatives, and a smattering of rather shy authors in a tiny bar decorated with next year's paperbacks. The decor was functional - five of the authors whose books had been scattered on the tables, shelves, and mantlepiece read during the evening. At first, people picked up the books, flicked through them, and put them down carefully before determining that no one was looking and sliding them subtly into handbags. Then Jason stood up and invited everyone to take as many as they wanted - and the vultures descended. My picture of the London publishing scene now consists of very well dressed people, wine glasses in hand, jumping over each other to get unedited proof copies of next year's books and cramming as many as they could fit into their bags - Windmill brought tote bags for everyone, it was that kind of event. A bit like a strip club for bibliophiles, except you got to take the girls home afterwards.

Besides the oodles of free books, the gallons of free wine, standing next to Sebastian Faulks and hearing Nick Harkaway read from Angelmaker (it is goooooooooood, trust me), my high point of the evening was meeting David Vann.

This bears explanation.

David Vann wrote Legend of a Suicide, a collection of short stories and a novella that explore some very concentrated territory that you might be able to guess from the title; what you probably won't be able to guess (spoiler) from the title is that the book contains about one hundred pages of a man dragging the decomposing body of his dead son through the Alaskan wilderness. Short stories are not meant to be consumed in marathon sittings. Short stories about suicide, probably even more so. Legends was a set text for Theory and Practice of Fiction last year, so (surprise!) I read it in a week, and then spent the next few months trying to cope with what I read.

So, when I found out that he was at the party, I went and found him, and told him that I would never forgive him for that book. And then we talked about Medea adaptations and castration in fiction. He's pretty cool.