A writer's life for me

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...

Well, it’s been a while, hasn’t it? I feel like my plan to blog here throughout writing my PhD book has been completely hijacked by how much time it’s actually taken to write a book… Funny, that. My New Year’s Writing Resolution - one of many, in fact - is to start using this space more to discuss writing in the hope that someone might read it, or better yet, read it and find it interesting/useful/encouraging/anything good. So, what’s been happening? Well, I’ve finished the first draft of the novel for my PhD. Cue mass chorus of applause and cheering! I finished it a little while ago; so long ago, in fact, that I’ve managed to print the thing and rip it apart with line edits over the Christmas period (which, incidentally, is a near-on heart-breaking challenge that I will never again save for what is meant to be the most wonderful time of the year). In the beginning there were words crossed out, then whole paragraphs were lined through, eventually I was dragging my pen diagonally ac...

Why are women presented in such undesirable ways in violent/crime/thriller literature?  And why am I allegedly a massive, righteous feminist for asking this question?  For anyone reading this who doesn’t know me particularly well, my research focus for my PhD is a critical discussion of how the female gender is employed and manipulated in violent literature. For anyone reading this who doesn’t follow me on Twitter (and therefore doesn’t receive my weekly updates on what book I’m reading at the moment), I’ve recently finished Philip Kerr’s A Philosophical Investigation, and in a lot of ways, it was a good book. The novel is focussed around an alternative future (or at least, it was the future at Kerr’s time of writing; if memory serves right the setting is actually 2013), in which a Lombroso-inspired programme has been set up to identify men who are predisposed to violence - this is all done in the name of avoiding future ‘gynocide’ (the murder of females).   The con...

Or, in this case, just before you start again. So I’m aware that it’s been quite a while since I updated this space and I thought that rather than let the silence linger on for another uncomfortable month, it might perhaps be a good thing for me to actually write about what’s been going on. It turns out PhD degrees are actually quite difficult. I know - who would have thought it? It also turns out that despite writing 30,000 words of the first draft of my novel, I had somehow still ended up writing my way down the wrong road. And this is where the cracks appeared. For those who aren’t familiar with the process of doing a PhD - or at least, the process at the university where I’m doing mine - during your first year you are faced with the daunting task of going through Panel. It’s terrifying; the thing of nightmares, in fact, and I can feel palpitations building at the very mention of it. It was during the first few weeks of discussing Panel that it first became clear to me that ...

The last time that I mentioned my PhD in a blog post was back at the very end of October, where I promised regular updates and details on the changing nature of my project. The fact that we are now edging towards the end of December, and I’m only just delivering an update to you, is probably all you need to realise that my previous vow hasn’t exactly held strong. Thankfully, the optimism and excitement that I voiced in my last blog post about this is as strong now as it was then, in fact, I’d go as far to say that it’s growing. From the end of October to the end of November, there was a heck of a lot of reading. I’m gobbling down about two novels a week, and one non-fiction book a week, which I’m fairly happy with. I’ve made a decent dent in the Tony Hill series from Val McDermid, I’ve recently polished off Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin, Sebastian Faulks’ Engleby, and now I’m reading Tom Robbins’ Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas. You’re probably wondering what the hell I’m resear...