A writer's life for me

I just emailed the third draft of my creative thesis to my primary and secondary supervisors, two friends from my PhD cohort, and I’ve uploaded a draft to my Kindle for my other half to read. I’ve hit upon the usual feelings that you face when finishing and distributing a new draft, I think. Blind panic, genuine disbelief, and this horrendous, horrendous feeling of waking up in the morning and simply not knowing what to do with my time (the answer, of course, is go back to researching my critical accompaniment, but we’ll just leave a pin in that for now). The drafting process has been troublesome up to this point – as regular readers of these self-indulgent rants will already know – although I have developed a divide and conquer approach to editing that has carried me through with minimal discomfort (or maybe that’s hindsight softening the pain). The third draft, though, well that’s been a different beast altogether. In turns out that the reason the third draft has been su...

Warning: Here there be spoilers and curse words.  L.S. Hilton’s Maestra, published earlier this year, was one of those books that I didn’t think had annoyed me – until I started to talk about it. I briefly reviewed it earlier today for my website ( www.madhatterreviews.co.uk ) and found myself torn between saying how much I enjoyed it – which I really think I did – and saying how much it annoyed me – which I really think it did. The novel itself isn’t the issue, as such, and by that I mean it’s perfectly fine in terms of how it’s written and even the plot is mostly okay – my issue is actually with the main character, Judith, and Hilton’s treatment of her. When my other half asked what I thought of this book, I said: ‘It’s okay, but I’d like a chat with the author, I think.’ ‘Why?’ he replied. ‘Because I’d like to know what her intentions were with the main character.’ It was an accidentally stiff response, but that’s what my issue boils down to. Judith is a s...

We are, after much feet-dragging and time-wasting on my part, officially in third draft territory... And even though it’s 12:24pm and I just answered the front door, still wearing my pyjamas with, as it turns out, one or two ink-stains around my mouth from anxiously chewing at my scribble-pen so much, I feel like I’m in pretty good shape. Although I can see why that opening description might make you think otherwise – and I can fully understand the postman’s, ‘Oh,’ when he looked up and saw me. For a second I thought I should probably explain myself but I landed torn between, ‘Sorry, I’m doing a PhD,’ and, ‘Sorry, I’m having a minor breakdown,’ because the two things feel somewhat synonymous at the moment. Instead, I opted for a, ‘Thanks, have a good day,’ which seemed just about normal enough to redeem me from my tartan attire. So here we are, third draft territory. It’s not a bad place, really. In fact much of my time here is made up of drinking tea, eating crumpets, and...

Friends, Romans, readers: You have missed a lot. In my head I had been updating this fairly regularly; I see now that I haven’t actually posted anything since the back-end of July, and since then I have – believe it or not – gone through a monumental spin on the PhD wheel. This spin, though, actually saw me fall in love with my research while I started to heavily resent my creative thesis – in a (half-)surprising turn of events. Only half-, though, given that on average PhD students seem to move between loving and loathing what they are doing between three and twenty-eight times a week - so perhaps one spin on the PhD wheel is a huge understatement. Earlier this week, I still firmly hated my creative thesis. I had submitted a draft to my supervisor at the start of the summer so that I could spend time working on my research paper in the months that followed - and I did, rather successfully. I spent most of my summer, in fact, buried beneath mountains of research. I read, I scribbl...

Separation Anxiety is defined as ‘anxiety provoked in a young child by separation or threat of separation from its mother or main carer’. Writing as someone who has just submitted the second draft of their creative thesis to their supervisor – still 18,000 words shy of the length it should be, might I add – I feel like I’m currently in a steady position to widen that definition – or at the very least, add an alternative meaning to it, perhaps. Separation Anxiety (2): The feeling experienced by tortured creative types on distributing their work to a group of people who aren’t morally obligated to care about their feelings, and will therefore give them (brutally) honest feedback on their submission. When you look at it that way, I think the anxiety I’m feeling right now is legitimate. Entirely useless and fairly debilitating when it comes to establishing a proper work regime for the remaining chunk of my thesis, which I still haven’t written. But legitimate, nevertheless. ...

Some basic facts... The creative element of my PhD thesis needs to be 80,000 words. The first draft of my creative element was just over 94,000 words. The advice that followed this was, naturally, to be harsh on myself with line edits and general edits that would shape the second draft of the manuscript, and would subsequently lower the word count of the book as a whole. And the final fun fact... My second draft is now 18,500 words shy of the length that it needs to be. I have simultaneously taken one step forward and nearly 20,000 steps back and so I’m doing the only logical thing I can think to do at this stage – I’m walking away. Hands flat and raised, panic at a steady rise, I have ‘finished’ the first round of the second draft of my manuscript and I am backing away slowly, for at least a week, maybe even longer. So for anyone who follows me on one social media channel or another, if you see anything to suggest that I’m tinkering with that damn book again, ...

Earlier this week my protagonist stopped talking to me. It’s not as mad as it sounds – I promise – but there really is no other way to describe what happened. I was working on a chapter, or rather a section of a chapter, which saw my protagonist interact via a series of text messages with another character – and it just wasn’t working. I pushed and shoved and wrote and rewrote. It could have been writer’s block – whatever that means, if such a thing even exists – but something about this felt personal. I looked to my protagonist for an answer and found her faced away from me, arms folded, foot tapping on the floor as if to say, ‘Well if you don’t know, I’m not going to tell you.’ So I did the only logical thing that I could think of. I packed up my protagonist, took her into town, and we had a catch up over a cup of tea. I’m not really helping the ‘It’s not as mad as it sounds’ argument there, am I? Hear me out, though... When I wrote the first draft of my PhD book, I...

There is a delicious irony hidden somewhere in the fact that my last PhD-related blog post loosely promised that I was getting better at blogging, having released two updates in two weeks... The irony being that I made that statement nearly two months ago and, since then, my blog has been a PhD-free zone. So, maybe I’m not as good as I thought I was. Or maybe I’ve been having a PhD-wobble, of sorts, which is something – I hope/think/know – the majority of fellow students and writers alike will be able to empathise with. And it surely, hopefully, must, go some way towards explaining my lack of updates over the past few weeks. Now I’m looking back over my last blog post – where I detailed the beginnings of an editing process that I at the time felt quite proud of – and I’m thinking: ‘Ugh, how stupid you were to be so goddamn positive about this whole mess.’ But I’m having to shout these words quite loudly to myself on account of being so deeply buried beneath the ongoing secon...

In Her Wake is the recently published novel from Amanda Jennings, released a little earlier this year by the friendly folks over at Orenda Books, and it has been collecting glowing reviews – all of which I have tried to avoid – for weeks on end. Now, having dipped into the book myself, it’s clear to me why. I was around three pages in to this read, in fact, when I turned to my friend next to me and said: ‘Bloody hell, this is going to be a good one.’ The novel follows the story of Bella. A young woman who returns to her family home following the unexpected death of her mother, only to be greeted by a father who is so overcome with guilt and anxiety – perhaps what you’d expect following the loss of a spouse, but certainly not how you’d expect it – that their already strained relationship only worsens in the opening chapters of this book. When Bella’s father, Henry, finally reveals what he’d been holding in for so long, Bella’s world promptly falls apart – and the reader’s heart pr...

I’m on the precipice of panic, I’ve said something and I can’t retract it and worse still you won’t let me. I’m on the cusp of begging you to forget me but you’ve already made it uncomfortably clear that no matter how near to the cliff face I feel, you’re not letting me go anywhere. And so I run. Wind in hair, feet pounding ground, I’m endeavouring to outrun light and sound but then you catch me by the collar just as my feet are about to become unbound. I’m on the edge of something now, inhaling sea air and as my lungs contract you try to pull me back in tact but I’m still wriggling against you. You can’t understand what I’m hiding from on the cliff top, why a long drop and a slow stop might seem more appealing that whatever these emotions are that I’m feeling, which should give you an idea of how itchy they make me, or maybe an idea of how few I’m showing and how many I’m really concealing. I can feel a world of love inside my che...

Two posts in two weeks; it’s almost, almost , like I’m getting a better hang on this blogging thing. Or perhaps the more likely explanation is that I need somewhere to hang my editorial woes and, given that my characters have taken over much of my dining room at present – I’ll explain that part in a second – the internet seems like the best place to air this writerly laundry. It’s Monday morning. The sun is coming in through the open doors behind me and I have a cup of tea sitting to the left of me. Over the weekend I completed a ‘tidy up’ of my book which has left me in a reasonably good position to start the next round of edits. On the topic of that next round of edits: I actually have a plan in place. A real, ordered, seems-totally-feasible-to-edit-a-book this way plan. ‘What’s the catch?’ you ask. I’ll let you know when I find it. For now, though, my dining room is quickly turning into a physical representation of what the inside of my head looks like – maybe that’s the ca...

It’s a teenie, tiny, I’m between things on my to-do list and I really should be doing other work right now, sort of update this time. After my recent editing-inspired-meltdown, it seemed like it would be worth checking in with anyone reading to assure them that a) I am perfectly fine and b) I have been through the first and second rounds of feedback provided by my supervisors, and everything is okay. I mean, I’ll be working 12 – 18 hour days forever, but apart from that everything is definitely okay.   I have a surprisingly manageable shopping list in terms of what needs to be addressed and edited in the second draft of my book/creative element and – if I’m being brutally honest with myself – as yet no one has given me feedback that I haven’t agreed with on some level. There are pacing issues galore and there are about a thousand missed opportunities for making the book richer – in terms of plot and character – than it currently stands. The critic has taken over now – as i...

Before I go ahead and open heart into this blog post, I feel that I should add a small disclaimer here where I praise the bones of my two supervisors who have, throughout my degree so far, been life-savers for myself and my project. They have taken time and given thought and I’m absurdly grateful to both of them for what they’ve already done, and what they will continue to do over the next 18 months. That being said, nothing that my supervisors can do will silence the panicked process that I have now come to accept as simply being: The way I edit things. One Monday I had a joint supervision session with both supervisors as a follow-up to my first draft, which they had both read and scrutinised ahead of this meeting. My second supervisor had not only read the whole manuscript but had also annotated the whole thing, giving me a coversheet with comprehensive notes about the whole book and specific comments scribbled on the pages that followed. It was wonderful, it really was. T...