A writer's life for me

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...