Just another day of revision...

My web browser has tabs open to the UC Davis Veterinary Medicine page, the Doctor of Vet Med curriculum, a search result on crisis pregnancy centres, a page of search results on 'adoption in the 1980s', a history of forced sterilisation in the US, a calendar for 2004, several Google street views of Las Vegas, the Wikipedia page for second-wave feminism, several photographs of New England lobster boats and Floridian crab boats, the Web MD brief history of mifepristone, and Amazon pages for Building Your Cult: Power, Politics, and People and Combatting Cult Mind Control, two indispensable volumes for the modern reader.  Drugs don't get much of a look-in this time because I did way more research than was really necessary for The Shore, and I have the kind of freaky memory that can't recall my spouse's birthday but can perfectly recall useless information from years ago.

The good thing about all that is that the novel is no longer riddled with embarrassing notes like (insert two paragraph description of a crab boat). The bad thing is that it's starting to get too long to be easy to handle, which is odd because it seemed almost too short to be a proper novel, both when I was first writing it and every time I look at the skinny little notebooks in which I wrote it. I have an unhealthy preoccupation with tracking my progress in fractions, which gets more difficult at a certain length because Word gives up on providing a word count once the 100,000 word mark is reached. After 99,999 you're on your own for some reason.

Pictured: the moment before I stopped being able to figure out exactly how many words I had left to clean up without a serious amount of jiggery-pokery.

The beast still lacks a title, but I'm starting to be a little less ashamed of it, or most of it at any rate. Though I do wonder what the NSA makes of my Google habits.

Note to self

It's a pain to keep track of timeline and continuity in a rough draft. But it's even more of a pain to piece together timeline and continuity from context clues in a later draft and have to rework it all because your characters have somehow lived through three summers in a row and the year you've described is only five months long.

On a related note, Present Sara really has it in for Past Sara today.

Home for the summer

Hope finally glimmers through the clouds - I'm finished in Norwich, barring calamity, until things kick off again in the new term. Which means that this past weekend the incomparable spouse-thing drove up to Norwich, carried my suitcase, books, papers, assorted odds and ends required for daily functioning, assorted groceries that I hadn't had the organisational skills to use up in time, and a rather large potted succulent called Lazarus (due to my failure to kill said plant despite no plant-related skills whatsoever and a larger share than normal of plant-related bad luck) down three flights of stairs, packed it all in the car while leaving sufficient space for me, and hauled the lot the ± three hours to Reading with exceeding good humour. 

The plant that could not be killed

I had thought that by the time I got to be this old I'd be done with the whole student move-out-for-the-summer-move-back-when-school-starts thing. Oh well. 

I still have a paper to write for the Higher Education Practice training course that's kept me in Norwich for so long after the end of term, along with supervisors' marching orders and several inboxes to excavate, but at least I don't have any more train journeys to look forward to for a few months. And around about when the weather started improving (I don't say 'got nice' because it's still pretty dang chilly and wet in Reading for some reason) Dave started getting antsy about finishing all of the around-the-house projects that he was too busy to tackle when he first moved in, and the first of those just happens to be turning the junk room into my office. This could have been accomplished by sticking a desk in the room and calling the job done, but he's still in nesting mode and wants to Do It Right, which means I've learned way more about the composition of a 1960s era council house than I cared to. With any luck the whole thing will be done in the next few weeks and I can stop getting sighed at for scratching the dining room table.

Excessive, joyous squealing.

Ali Smith has won the Women's Prize with the incomparable How to be Both!

I'll just be in my corner, doing my happy dance.

Reading at UEA

Popping this up before I forget about it again. Given that it's a UEA Prose MA party there is almost guaranteed to be wine that is nearly as good as the fiction being read. And I can tell you, having met/heard/read this lot before, the fiction that will be read is seriously good. 

Digging myself out

The end of term felt a little like re-entering Earth's atmosphere, with extra emphasis on the high-speed-towards-the-ground part, possibly because I dealt with the impossible workload by getting up early, staying up late, and eating exactly what my internal toddler demanded. So now that all of the really important deadlines are past it feels not so much like I've hit the wall as become embedded in the wreckage that was wall before I came at it at terminal velocity. I may have completely stopped responding to emails. And phone calls. And text messages. And my own name.

But on the upside, I'm in Reading once again with the work that I enjoy and free access to David's sweaters. And yesterday The Shore came out in the USA and Canada, which I've been looking forward to for so long that I completely blanked on the date - first I forgot that it hadn't come out already, then I forgot it was May already. Then my mother sent me this:

In hindsight, I'm really glad that I've got the next few projects on the go; if I'd waited until now to start the next thing I'd probably be too intimidated to begin. Although I've been told off recently by several people for having more than one project on the go at once, so there may indeed be no way to win at this besides utterly transcending my personal flaws.

Also also, somewhere in there I managed to come up with the bare bones of an author's website, almost as if I am a real, live adult!

It's possible that the only thing that is saving me at the moment is that I've got two books to work on at once. One book is at the first draft stage, and I found a while back that if I spend too much of the day writing I stop being able to speak. The other book is going through its first full revision, and if I spend too much of the day revising I usually manage to retain my powers of speech, but stop making any logical sense. So the net result is that I have one project to keep me busy in the morning, the other to keep me busy in the afternoon, and have generally stopped talking or making sense.

The first draft of the book for Henry is a little more than two thirds done, and looks like this: 

The closed notebook is full, the open notebook has about ten thousand words in it, and it's hard to tell from the photograph but the three sheets of A4 are the latest version of the outline and all but part three is checked off. And one of those pens has a very flat spot in the nib tip from dramatic overuse. 

 So, in an effort to preserve the tipping of my other pens I've switched back to bottled ink - cartridges are fun for variety, but they tend to flow slower than I write, which leads to drying up and scratching and nibs not lasting as long as they should.

The other piece of work (and it is a piece of work in every sense of the word) looks like this:

This is the novel that I wrote during the MA - in case I never said while I was working on it, it follows a woman and her kid on a trip across America in an attempt to settle a lifetime's worth of unfinished business. The stack on the left is the 149 pages that I've so far annotated for revision, and the so much smaller stack on the right are the 50 pages that still need to be gone through. Which, all things considered, isn't all that much left to comb through. This one will probably get a second go-through as I'm putting the ink and paper edits into the Word document, but I'm starting to get a sense of what shape it might be when it's finished - and starting to get a sense that it will be finished sooner than later. And, publishing aside, that's the really exciting part.

Blah

Dear World:

Marking has eaten my brain. And my soul. And possibly my will to live.

And what the marking didn't get C-HEP training is leisurely nibbling from the toes up, with that relaxed persistence born of the certainty that the prey isn't going anywhere so there's no point in scarfing it all down at once.

If I make it out the far end there will be so many words about C-HEP.

- The Innocent