And so it goes...

I'm just a little bit proud of the fact that I got through a first pass of The Lauras in 36 hours, which means that the resulting draft is shorter by about 17,000 words (or one word in six) and the notes that Jason sent me now look like this:

 I'm trying to be organised, Mom, I swear! 

Since the first pass was mainly about reducing the size of the book like a contestant on a medically questionable reality TV show, any note that couldn't be dealt with by making a straightforward cut got marked with a tab. And since I'm eternally trying to overcome my entropic nature, they're colour coded: green-yellow is for notes that need a second look, pink for timeline issues, blue for differences of opinion, and orange for those rare moments where I have no idea what the note is asking me to do.

There aren't that many tabs, all things considered, but cutting that much will have left narrative holes that need to be puttied in. I've also got notes from Lucy that I'm hoping will cover anything that my editor missed.

Juuuust a little more intimidating than all the coloured tabs.

And while I'm at it, there's my own self to satisfy. During the cutting portion I kept running across sentences that needed to be tightened up, which means that I'm probably far enough away from the thrill of having written the thing to be able to see it clearly. Which means it's time to go through and make sure that every single word is the exact perfect word and ruthlessly remove any that aren't.

So, with all that to do and limited time to do it in, it makes perfect sense that the moment I finished the first pass was the moment that my brain decided it was vacation time, as certain brains are wont to do. What have I been doing since I finished the first past? God alone knows, because I sure don't. When will my brain come back and start behaving? With any luck, the moment I click publish and go make another cup of coffee. But that's assuming I don't run into any half-read books on the way back.

Notes!

It turns out that all of my inbox watching was in vain, because Jason's notes arrived in the form of a fat package through the post.

It weighs about as much as the two hardcovers he sent with it...

The manuscript is 300-odd pages long and just a little bit intimidating; I've given it a flip-through and several pages are crossed out entirely. But still, frightening notes are better than no notes, and I've been impatient to get back to working on it. With any luck there will be proofs to fling around by the time the London Book Fair arrives. I've heard rumours of cover art being ready to ogle in a week or so, though all things considered I'm not sure that said rumours aren't serving as the proverbial carrot: never to be held in the hand, much less made into cake.

Of course I can get through that in two weeks.


Famous last words.

Re-imagined fairy tales

When I was doing the MA I had heaps of time to both write and submit short stories to anywhere that would take them. So naturally I wrote and submitted stories like they were going out of style, and then promptly forgot that I'd sent out to people because steroid psychosis tends to do that to a person. The up side of all the forgetting is that stuff is popping up now like inky little crocuses. I can't go through my files without finding something I don't remember writing, and every now and again I hear from people who I don't remember submitting to.

Which is why I'm as surprised as anyone that a short story of mine has been published in an anthology of darkly re-imagined fairy tales: 

Gotta admit, I adore the cover. 

Grimm and Grimmer, Volume 4 is free to Kindle subscribers and pretty dang cheap (less than a fiver) for everyone else. Check it out. 

The Kitschies

Cuddly tentacles were given out on Monday night, in the downstairs of a pub in London. Like the downstairs of a lot of pubs, this one had a pretty low ceiling, which I only noticed when the actual prize-giving began and nearly all the men who took the microphone had to crouch to avoid braining themselves. My memory of the evening is fuzzy - much like the tentacles - probably because I was preoccupied by the fact that MARGARET ATWOOD WAS THERE and MARGARET ATWOOD WAS WEARING A TENTACLE MONSTER.

Photo borrowed from the kitschie's blog with hopes they won't mind. 

Dave kept trying to make me go and say hello to her - it was a small enough event that that wouldn't have been totally weird - and I kept threatening to deck him if he didn't stop, because I'm of the theory that one should never meet one's heroes unless expressly sought out by them, because there lies the path to madness and restraining orders. I was amused to find out that her agent, who was also there and wearing tentacles, was the agent that made my MA year cry in despair many moons ago. Small world, ain't it?

Only tangentially related: I keep hearing that writers never really get famous because people can't pick them out on the street, and I wonder if it's a symptom of my work, of being connected to UEA, or of having an obsessive personality that I do recognise a lot of the well-respected writers on sight, even ones who I don't personally read and have never actually met. I guess it makes it a little less weird that the ones who I recognise immediately, from the back, and across a crowded room (Ali Smith, Helen Dunmore, Kate Mosse... ok, Margaret Atwood) are all people I've met in person. 

All of the books (and video games) on the shortlists sound amazing. Like most book events, the room was decorated with copies from the shortlist, and I managed to make off with a few, but all of them are going onto my to-read list. And books that more closely fit the criteria of progressive and speculative are going onto my to-write list. 

There must have been something either in the air or the water. About halfway through the evening Dave pulled on my sleeve and said, "Golden Ratio." Then, on the eight-minute tube ride to Liverpool Street Station we worked up the outline of an entire speculative novel from that one concept, wrote it down, and moved on to an epic fantasy blending sci-fi and dragons before having to get off. And now it looks like both of us wish we could temporarily abandon responsibility to go write, which is pretty normal for me but less so for Dave. So if I happen to vanish in the near future, it might have something to do with spirals. 

(Not) Procrastinating

I've admitted to myself that continuously refreshing my inbox isn't going to make Jason's notes come any faster, and that hiding under my bed isn't going to make the other work that I should have already done go away, so I've finally settled in to try and do my American taxes. Which are far more confusing than my English taxes, because the tax forms all assume that you're earning in USD, living in the States, and getting all these forms along with your income that don't seem to exist in Britain. Take multiple currencies, add tax years that cover different date ranges, multiply by the number of different income streams, and it will make perfect sense why I've been doing literally anything other than dealing with it.

When I got to be a teenager and started earning money, my parents told me that I shouldn't worry about taxes: my dad would do them until I got married, then my husband would do them until one of us kicked it, and that was the way the world worked. Then when I got to my twenties and had to juggle paying for grad school with a dozen sources of income in four currencies without screwing up enough to land in jail my mom told me to stop stressing about it, my financial situation couldn't possibly be as topsy-turvey as I insisted it was. Now I have an accountant because no one, related by blood or marriage, is willing to touch my taxes without fiscal encouragement, and it's the most I can manage to gather together the documentation; I'd rather go to jail for evasion than file myself.

Come to think of it, my family has a pretty consistent track record for giving me a hard time for worrying about things that they say either won't happen or shouldn't worry me, only for the exact thing I've gotten worked up about to turn out to be exactly as much of an issue as I initially thought it would be. Sometimes it takes weeks, sometimes years, but it seems to always happen - with the exception of my paralysing fear that I'd not get into university.

So I was riffling through my filing cabinet trying to find the documents for the accountant and pulling out writery things for the Archive - and being unprecedentedly proud of myself for not only managing to hang onto all of my payment advice slips from last year, but having them all in the same file AND in the house where the tax doing needs to happen - when I found a bunch of writing from the end of the MA that I'd totally forgotten about. And one of the little bits was a sort of note-to-self in defence of the first person. And since all that sort of thing is going to the Archive I figured it made sense to copy it out here (which is actually why I sat down to write this post in the first place, as opposed to whining about taxes) because it's a question I still haven't heard satisfactorily answered.

A while back I wrote a horror story in which the narrator gets turned into a zombie at the end, and the editor of the anthology it was going in objected to the use of the first person on the grounds that, if the character gets turned into a zombie, how are they narrating the story? Which made me think about the whole idea of first person narrators. Epistolary novels have more or less fallen by the wayside, so in a lot of cases, while a first-person narrator is essentially telling the reader the story, exactly how that is occurring isn't made clear, even if it is technically plausible. In most cases the narrator stays alive to the end, so I suppose it could be argued that they wrote the whole thing down after the fact. Except we all accept that fiction is a construct - the first person narrator isn't the one who has written the story. And so I object to the idea that the question 'how is this person telling us this story?' has to have a logical answer.

What makes less sense? That there's some disembodied consciousness following a bunch of characters around who then records it all once they've offed each other so that an external party can enjoy the account, or that the reader is a parasite in the character's mind and therefore experiencing it all as it happens. Why can't the narrator die at the end? What demands the greater suspension of disbelief: that the narrator dies and yet the narration follows them through death, or the fact that this takes place in a world where black magic is possible and girls can turn their older sisters into zombies?

There aren't many questions that irk me more than 'how is this narration possible?' It's possible because we as a species have developed written language and an appreciation for fiction. It's possible because the narrative hasn't actually been written by the narrator. It exists, therefor it's possible.

OED, how I love thee

It's been nearly three years since I started writing Belief, the novel that's going to form the majority of my dissertation and which I'm not supposed to talk about until The Lauras has been published. Its development has been painful: the writing has been slow, the revising has been slow, the research has been impossible, and every time I dragged a chunk of it to Henry's office his response has been some iteration of, "Nope. Try again."

Until last week, when I showed him the seventh version of the first chapter, and he said, "This is it. Now make the other 140,000 words just like it. And add some more period detail."

So today I got to sit down with the printout that he scribbled on to try and fit in a little more period detail. I've been putting off adding more period detail for a while, because detail for a period that people who are still living can remember is an utter pain in the rump and other parts of the anatomy.

In the first chapter there's a single sentence about mother-daughter shopping trips. Practically a throwaway line. Except these shopping trips are supposed to take place in New York in 1963. I'm eternally grateful to the people who keep retro, vintage, mid-century and etc. blogs, because otherwise that one line would have taken me far longer than the three hours I spent on it. And I'm still nervous that someone my aunt's age is going to read it and take me to task over getting makeup fashions wrong.

The fun side of 'period' writing (I can see my mother now, having a fit because I called the decade of her youth 'period') is that I got to spend the entire day farting around on the internet and emailing relatives and can still call it work. Things I got to look up today: Jello salads, Bloomingdales, polyester, makeup, stockings, dresses, retro fashion in general, shag rugs, sunken living rooms, kitchen appliances, cocktail parties, first communion dresses, lunch counters, romance novels, movie heartthrobs, teen movies, drive-in movies, girl's athletics, field hockey, beach party films, 1969 current events, rocks glasses, the history of the words 'tart,' 'chick,' and 'queer,' and female sexual awakening because I'm 99% sure that my own was far from representative.

The best part of all of that was my discovery of the OED's historical thesaurus. How it works is this: you enter a word (in my case, 'tart') and it gives you a list of synonyms in the order in which they came into recorded usage, complete with a date of first recorded usage. So now I know that 'tart' came into use with the meaning 'woman of questionable virtue' in 1864, 'virago' circa 1000, 'carline' in 1375, 'minikin' in 1540, 'maness' in 1594, and 'lost rib' in 1647, and that there is a slew of other terms for woman with a range of connotations that really should come back into use because those commonly used now just lack something.

Tentacles and paperback reviews

So I found out this afternoon that The Shore has been shortlisted for the Golden Tentacle, the category of The Kitschies ("The prize for progressive, intelligent, and entertaining literature with a speculative element") reserved for debut fiction. The fact that The Shore is being considered spec fic makes me clam-in-mud happy - it also makes me really want to go off and write some properly hardcore speculative fiction, but I've promised to finish the current projects before I start anything else. There are five books on the shortlist, and I'm crossing my fingers that I get a chance to get my dirty mitts on the other four. Winners are announced on the 7th of March, which isn't very long to wait at all. And there aren't any poets on the shortlist, so I've got a tiny measure of hope this time.

And while I'm broadcasting news, an author Q&A has gone up on the review site run by Deborah Kalb for anyone who has questions but won't get a chance to ask them. And the Sunday Times ran a review for the paperback edition that was wonderfully positive and used the term 'anti-pastoral.' I'm not sure if I should get that tattooed somewhere or just use it as my work credo - next should come an anti-road novel, then an anti-family drama, and one day maybe an anti-romance if I work really hard.

Usually I dread looking at my email inbox, and doubly dread needing to respond to anything, but after having all of that come in today I'm almost feeling downright fond of the monstrosity...