The Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year

... is most deservedly Sarah Howe for Loop of Jade, a stunning collection of poetry that takes inspiration from the author's dual heritage as the child of a British father and a Chinese mother and her puzzling out of her cultural identity. I'm quite glad both that she won (the collection is seriously wonderful) and that poetry is getting recognition this year, since the landscape for poets so often seems quite bleak. And, as with the Guardian prize, I wish I had found a bookie ahead of time that was running odds.

No one was told ahead of time who the winner was, so I had the chance to chill with the other shortlistees in the Art Room of the London Library. While we were chatting and sipping and trying to quell our nerves before the party I had the odd realisation that it's quite likely we four will be running into each other one way or another for the rest of our professional lives, as will many of the young writers that I've met since March; it was odd but not unpleasant to wonder who of us will park our zimmer frames close together in sixty-odd years so that we can grouse about young upstarts and publishing trends. The party afterwards was very good, though I wound up chatting to too many people to get much to either drink or eat, and was star-struck by Sarah Waters to an embarrassing degree. 

And now that the prize has run its course there is nothing between me and the mound of critical work that came down to Reading to be done during break. 

But then, the laundry does appear to be piling up... 

Literary Friction

In the midst of the skittering around of a few weeks ago I paused to drop in on the agency of Conville and Walsh and have a conversation with two brilliant people on revenge, generational issues, and the books we've enjoyed reading recently. Said brilliant people are Carrie Plitt and Octavia Bright, the minds behind Literary Friction, the radio show/podcast about books and ideas (which has an awesome name). The session I took part in went out on NTS  last week and I, of course, missed it (because I'm amazingly good at missing everything), but now it is available as a podcast for anyone who would like to have a listen (hi, Mom!) and possibly crib book recommendations. 

I have a lot more to say, but today is the day that I haul myself and my work back to Reading for the month and I haven't really slept in the past week or so, so more words will have to come when I have more brain.

Wall

I'm sitting at my desk for the ninth semi-consecutive hour of the day looking at the two undergraduate dissertations that I need to ink up in time to talk to their authors tomorrow about all the comments made on the earlier drafts that they somehow neglected to incorporate.

Earlier today I was the only person in a professional developments session on networking that wasn't a first year or running the thing. They were all so hopeful. And neatly dressed. And they all knew what their thesises (thesii?) were on. And they wanted to talk about how intimidating it was composing emails to their supervisors. And afterwards I saw them all eating pretty lunches in the postgrad space while socialising.

And I hadn't brushed my hair because I couldn't find my hairbrush and I was wearing the same clothes I wore down on the train yesterday and I hadn't packed a lunch because there was no food in the house to pack and I'd had anti-inflammatories for breakfast because spending that long on the train always makes my back cranky and I avoided them all because I had to mark up those dissertations before I ran out of steam for the day. Which, as is probably obvious, doesn't seem to have happened.

I might be inordinately proud of the fact that I didn't strangle any of them. Heck, I didn't even snap at them.

And now I'm alternating between looking at the dissertations but not marking them up and looking at the draft I owe Henry but not revising it, and taking occasional breaks to think about the work I was supposed to have done for Rachel by now and wondering if she's noticed either the draft I sent her at the beginning of November or that there hasn't been anything from me since.

I may have also paused to arrange my coterie of sock owls into comforting configurations.

The little one in the middle is squeaking 'you can do it!' Or possibly,  'if you don't do it I will invade your dreams with a machete and make you wish you had!' 

There's obviously only one thing to do in this situation...

And that is to leaf through my downloads folder

and find something relevant. Because my downloads folder always has something relevant.

And then probably wander into the kitchen,

find something vaguely good-tasting,

make a drink,

And then see how long these dissertations take me.

Aftermath: way too many words about the past week

We appear to have hit the sudden death round of term. Or that could just be an idiosyncrasy of my calendar and everyone else is bopping along the same as always; I'm never sure.

On Monday I skittered to London, first to sit down with Carrie Plitt and Octavia Bright in the Conville and Walsh office to record a segment for Literary Friction, a monthly conversation about books that airs on NTS and that you really should be listening to, then to Foyles to have a chat with Andrew Holgate ahead of the evening's readings. The turnaround between the judges selecting the winning book and the book being announced in the Sunday Times is apparently a hair's breadth, so he interviewed all four of us with the aim of being able to pop out a write-up of the winner in that gap - respect due for journalistic integrity, but I do not envy him. 

Three previous winners of the prize came to speak before the shortlistees, and I just barely managed to not embarrass myself by fawning all over Helen Simpson - "Diary of an Interesting Year" was both an influence for The Shore and used to scar my writing students; "Hey Yeah Right Get a Life" scarred me when I was a student; her stories have been my company back and forth across the ocean and in the darkest parts of sleepless nights - who I never thought I'd have the chance to meet. Andrew Cowan, who I haven't really spoken to since he supervised my MA dissertation, was also there, which was a little odd since I remember exactly nothing from that year and he appears to retain a crystal clear recollection of every moment, which is not a dynamic one wants to have with a director at one's university. 

The actual event went well, but the evening ended with Andrew and I running across London and through the underground in an effort to get to Liverpool Street Station in time for the 22.30 train back to Norwich. We made it to the station at 22.27, winded and sans dignity, to find that the train had been cancelled and the next one left at 23.30 and would take three hours to arrive owing to leaves on the track. To cut a long story short, I made it home by 3 AM having shared a drink, a train carriage table, and a taxi with Andrew, and now know far more UEA gossip than I'd thought I ever would. 

On Tuesday I woke up with the sudden realisation that, if I wanted to get to London on time for the Guardian ceremony on Wednesday, I'd better leave that afternoon. Autumn is the season of cancelled trains in East Anglia, and I've missed too many important things due to being stranded before. So I dragged myself up to pack, deal with the contents of the refrigerator, do the dishes, put in some laundry, and all of the other little things a body has to do before they leave the house for a week. 

Given how little sleep I'd gotten, I was a bit shocked that I managed to get myself in gear and out the door in time to catch the 15.30 train. Which was cancelled. But that was a good thing, because I found when I got to the station that I'd lost my railcard the night before. No one had found it, but they could make me a new one if I could get my hands on a passport photo. So I ran with my suitcase across the road to find a photo booth, cried just enough that the lady at the counter accepted my student card as proof that I was a student, and got on the 16.00 train just before it left. And then realised that I'd left my rings on the counter of the kitchen that my housemate is inevitably going to destroy this weekend, and if he can make tupperware and five gallon slow cookers vanish then a few bands of silver have no chance. 

That train was delayed, so when we finally got to London I had to fight my way off against the tide of people trying to get on, even though they had fifteen minutes before the train left to go back to Norwich. I spent twelve of those minutes in the station trying to find dinner before I realised that I'd left my suitcase with all of my work in it on the train, one minute panicking, forty-five seconds sprinting from one end of the station to the other in the hope that the train hadn't left yet, and thirty seconds babbling at rail workers in a panic as I sprinted down the platform, leapt into the carriage I'd ridden down on, ripped the damn suitcase out of the luggage rack, and fell back onto the platform a few seconds before the doors were due to lock. 

The next ten minutes were spent in the fetal position on the platform.  

So on Wednesday, when nothing happened to prevent me from getting to Blackfriars Bridge to meet Lucy in time to walk over to the OXO building for the Guardian party, I was nothing but relieved. And when we were standing on the stairs waiting to get into the party and talking about who we thought was going to win, all I wanted was to not win because I couldn't scare up any more nerve. And when it came down to it, I knew what book was going to win, because you don't announce a shortlist with "Book of poetry on shortlist for the first time in forever! Oh, there are these other five books, too" when the poetry isn't going to win. And then when it was announced that Physical was the winner I was far more satisfied than I should have been because I'd guessed correctly. 

It was an absolutely fantastic party, made just a little bit more fantastic by the fact that I (purposefully) look nothing like the one publicity photo that exists, so I got to spend the first half of the evening chatting with my publishers and my spouse-thing and taking unabashed advantage of our proximity to the door whence the food was issuing, while people who were meant to pin me down for a picture or a chat walked right past holding a reference photo taken when I had red hair.  Dave gave the game away when a woman with a massive camera and pictures of all the long-list authors came up and asked him if he was Peter Pomerantsev; it then took him an embarassingly long time to convince her that I am me. At which point I had drunk enough that talking to people wasn't scary at all, and I had a good long natter with several readers and quite a few industry people. I also at that point had no shame. Book events tend to be decorated with books, so several copies of the shortlist books were scattered tastefully around the room; this may or may not bear relationship to the fact that when I got home at 2 in the morning I somehow had the entire shortlist under my arm.

How did that get there?

And yesterday evening I had Thanksgiving dinner with my alma mater's study abroad group, caught up on the gossip back at home campus, gave out their class rings, and may have broke down sobbing when we sang the school song at the end of the evening. 

So today is, technically, the first day this week that I've got any hope of getting actual work done. But then, the kitchen cabinets could always stand to be alphabetised...

Back at the ranch...

It may not look like it, but the third year of the PhD has actually kicked off, and I've been actively participating in it.  So far, it's been a bit like going to cross the street, successfully dodging an out-of-control car, only to have a sinkhole full of bears open up beneath me the moment I hit the far sidewalk. Suddenly all of the Personal and Professional Development sessions on grant writing and job hunting are relevant and necessary, and a year isn't looking like a whole lot of time to get what I've done so far into the shape of a thesis. At some point in the past month or so the weekly beer-and-bitch session in the grad bar turned into a water-and-plan-this-conference-we-want-to-make-happen session, a different group of people cornered me in the bar while I had a fever and now I'm part of the group running the annual short story contest, and I'm scared to open any of my email inboxes.

 The first draft of Belief has been done for long enough that the feeling of accomplishment has worn off, but not so long that I've gotten around to typing it all up, which doesn't matter so much because I'm only allowed to submit 80,000 words of it at maximum. (The fact that I've groused about this at length should surprise exactly nobody). For months now I've been saying, mostly to Henry, that I need to sit down with that first 80k and give them a structural pounding before anything else useful can happen, but for various reasons ("It's summer! School is ages away!! Let's go to this festival and talk to people about books!!!) I've polished up random bits of new material to meet the past few deadlines and weathered the 'you can do better than this' lectures that they elicited.

Ok, it wasn't all laziness and butterflies; my other supervisor gave me the first week of November as the deadline to send her a reasonable draft of a 35 page journal article and I dropped pretty much everything but Shore stuff in order to get it done. Except she's on research leave and I haven't heard back from her since I sent the draft and I'm scared to message again and ask if she's seen it because I know she's going to give me another deadline that I can't make.

But I've finally gotten nervous about the ultimate deadline: October 2016 will mark the end of three years in the program and the beginning of when I'm allowed to submit a thesis. It also marks the end of my funding and the point when I really need to have figured out what I'm going to be doing, professionally speaking, after UEA ejects me from her sacred halls. And between that and Henry's almost telling off the fire appears to be lit beneath my posterior.

So how, exactly, do you turn 160,000-odd rambling first draft words into something that can be turned in without it looking like you're taking the piss? I have no idea, but here's what I'm doing:

It's been two years since I wrote the opening pages of the draft, so I honestly haven't got a clue what happens in the beginning, besides knowing it doesn't look a lot like what's on my outline. So  I sat down with the first 100,000 words of the draft and went through, page by page, writing an outline of what actually happens in the book, along with the dates because I am horrible at keeping timelines. Once that was done it was easy to see that I'd jumped all over the timeline while I was writing it, frequently revisiting earlier passages or jumping ahead to scenes I felt like writing. So I cut up the outline (all five pages of it) and put it in the order it was supposed to be in, and then used that as a guide to cut up the actual 100,000 words and put them in the order that I should have had them in in the first place. That was actually the quick part. The past few days and the rest of the weekend have been given over to the slow part: going through a paper copy of the manuscript with a needle-tipped blue pen, marking up all of the places that need to be expanded or moved or have details added, reconciling ages and dates and crossing chunks of needless waffling out, and writing up sticky notes with the details of scenes that need to be added but that I didn't know needed to be added when it was all out of order.

It's incredibly messy, and it does make me wish a little bit that I had written the book chronologically. But I've never really been able to write chronologically; more often than not, it's later scenes that make me realise what ought to have come before. And at any rate, it beats doing taxes.

The Guardian First Book Award

I must have a forgotten stash of four-leaf clovers somewhere, because it was announced earlier today that The Shore is on the Guardian First Book Award shortlist! It's one of six, and they all are excellent books; The Guardian has a piece up on the process of whittling down the list, which does not sound as though it was easy to do. The winner will be announced on the 25th of November, so I'll just have everything crossed until then.

Paperback cover: and now for something completely different!

The paperback edition of The Shore comes out in March, and the cover wizards have decreed that it shall have art all of its own. And what does that art look like, you ask?

Of the people in silhouette, I guarantee that at least one of them is planning to murder you.

So now The Shore has not one, but three covers, none of which involve glitter, a martini glass, lipstick, high heels, or any of the other elements that seem to be code for 'book by a woman for woman: do not take seriously,' which was all I hoped for back when it had no covers. And for someone that's had absolutely no hand in the process, I'm disproportionately proud of how this one looks. Hardbacks are beautiful and durable, but I really prefer the tactile experience of reading in paperback. That, and they tend to weigh a lot less, which is a significant consideration if you spend a lot of time shuffling between points A and B on mass transportation.

That and hardcovers never caused a moral panic simply because of their binding.