Little joys

I'm back to drafting the PhD novel at a respectable rate, with the reasonable hope that it will be finished in time for its autumn deadline and Henry won't have to give me that look again. It's getting to the really satisfying all-the-bits-come-together point that sometimes results in entire days being unintentionally devoted to writing. Which means that I've used up a lot of ink. So about a month ago I went online to try and replace my ink, since the only place I've found ink I like in person is in Oxford, and I really needed to lay in some new converters as I have a bad habit of cracking mine. Besides accidentally expanding my pen collection, I also found out that it is possible to buy syringes of the right size to refill cartridges.

If you want to know how I did it before, the answer is 'messily' - given the viscosity of ink, a single drop is too big to fit through the hole in a standard cartridge. 

From there, it was only a matter of time before I realised that this would let me really have fun with mixing my own ink colours. Purists may pitch as many fits as they want, the results are seriously good enough to eat, and nothing I can get pre-mixed. The table is a mess, and all of my handkerchiefs are stained, but it is a wonderfully satisfying little side-hobby. And the manuscript has turned into a rainbow.

To answer the question of why I swap colours so much - swapping pens every page or so keeps my hand from cramping, since they're all slightly different sizes and grips. They all flow differently as well, and some days only certain ones feel right. Is it weird? Probably. Does it let me write for several hours at a stretch without a break? Definitely. Do I have a fountain pen problem? Ask Dave.

A sense of an ending

In February of 2013 I started writing a novel - an actual, linear, one narrator novel - for the first time since before I started college, because Ali Smith told me to. I didn't think I'd be able finish it, so I went for the first idea I had that seemed to have potential. And I thought trying to write something long would make the exercise worthwhile enough, so I decided to ignore everything professors had tried to hammer into me over the course of five years of higher education in favour of doing exactly what I wanted to do with it, because I was frankly sick of being told 'you can't.' It was probably the most well-behaved tantrum ever. By the end of January 2014 I had produced this:

The little tan one has notes and chronologies and things, because I learned my lesson with The Shore

 Which was a bit of a surprise, because I'd abandoned it several times over the course of the first draft. And then in September 2014 I managed to turn it into this:

It was only when I finished that I realised that this one has no death and hardly any graphic violence. 

Which was too embarrassingly horrible to show to anyone, and was almost chucked out in favour of any other novel I could be writing. But it was 93,500 words long, which is an awful lot of words to just throw away, so I figured that I could make another passthrough, cut all of the dreadful parts, and possibly come out the end with a novella.

Except on July 1st I finished the passthrough by writing a new ending that actually felt like an ending rather than an arbitrary stopping point and found that, despite the fact that I had cut about five thousand words outright and moved another five thousands to a file called 'darlings' that will never see light of day, the whole thing had grown to just over a hundred thousand words, which lands it pretty solidly in 'novel' territory. And, mysteriously, I felt like it was as done as I could get it without external input.

So that's one of the two novels I need to write this summer finished, or as finished as I can get it, and sent off to Lucy to see if these bones might live. And even though I still have a horrifying amount of work to do, I have the strangest feeling that I've actually gotten something done.

And now to finished book number three!

Interview at New in Books

Before I forget again (because a day late and a dollar short has been the theme of the past three years of my life so why break the streak?), an interview I did a while back on The Shore was posted on the website New in Books on Monday! The site is, of course a great place to find out about new books - which is something I'm actively bad at, believe it or not. But even if you are one of those wizards who always knows what to read next, it's worth taking a look - there appear to be periodic giveaways.

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.