I am back from the meeting with my advisor. University is crawling with students ... it's the first week of lectures. They all look so young and tiny. There are banners hung up all over the College of Arts protesting the universities decision to scrap two Arts departments. There was even a chalk sign scrawled on the bus stop - "Arts Students are not welcome here." On a side-note, I saw a little black cat running across the lawn with a big juicy rat hanging from its mouth. All the students who saw it applauded. That cat must be feeling pretty good about itself right now.
I haven't written any more since yesterday. I spent the morning thrashing the plot into some kind of shape.
It was really nice to hear my advisor say that he enjoyed the chapters. (Nice? Terrible word). He said he sat down intending to read a few pages and then get on to his other work, but he ended up reading all sixty A4, single-spaced pages at a sitting. I'm only giving him the chapters as and when I'm moderately happy with them ... that is, happy that they make sense and are coherent and have the basic rudiments of structure. As I left he gave me a wink and said "It's almost like reading a real book."
He is very confident that it will be published. That is encouraging. I am confident too, when I'm not rocking back and forth in a corner chewing the ends of my hair and freaking out. I am so looking forward to it being published that I am superstitious about it ... I won't let myself look too hard at the possibility in case my attention somehow jinxes it. So I'll carry on the way I have been. Just moving forwards, pushing up the word count, without thinking too far ahead or looking at it too closely. Plenty of time for that later.
(A side note - my advisor told me that there is a man in the Zoology department whose area of specialty is rabbit legs. Rabbit legs? So there are other people out there who are world experts on, I don't know, rabbit spleens? Also, is he a world expert on all the rabbit's legs, or just one of them - say, the front left? Just shows you can become a renowned expert on just about anything.)
Thursday, February 28, 2008
Wednesday, February 27, 2008
A sense of style
I have tried to write regular reviews of the books I read from time to time - or even just lists of what I'm reading - but it never works. It feels like drudgery, and I always abandon it after a while. Also, reading a book, or sometimes two, a day meant that I would have to be constantly updating. As I mentioned before, I'm taking an accidental break from reading.
I did want to upload a list of books that I have found particularly inspiring, though, in terms of their writing style. I feel an affinity with writers whose style is lyrical, vivid and quite spare ... I admire Tolkien's decision to use strong, Anglo-Saxon words that have more punch than the more flowery French ones that came into the language with the Norman invasion.
Anyway, here they are (the ones I can think of at this moment, anyway):
The Bone People - Keri Hulme
The Sparrow - Mary Doria Russell
A Passage to India - E.M. Forster
The Last Unicorn - Peter S. Beagle
What I Loved - Siri Hustvedt
Ladder of Years - Anne Tyler
If I think of any more, I'll add them ... the sun has cooked my brain somewhat today.
Oh, and worth mentioning for fantastic first-person narration:
Tamsin - Peter S. Beagle
I Capture the Castle - Dodie Smith
Mukiwa - Peter Godwin
And as you can see, the word count has climbed to 61,000! Hurrah.
I have just been looking at the information in my right-hand sidebar. It's a little misleading. I have published one novel, yes, and I am working on a new one, but in-between those two points there are all kinds of finished and half-finished projects. There's the sequel to the published book, and the half-finished third one (it was intended to be a trilogy, though each book stands alone), which will never get published now as: a) publishing books in Zim, where the first one came out, is no longer viable; and b) I wrote the sequels when I was sixteen, and if I read them now I would probably cringe and bury them in the garden. Since then I have also written two young adult fantasy novels: The Story Spinners (which I always mean to go back and revise); and Destiny, which I sent off to a few publishers a couple of years ago. Destiny generated some interest, and Macmillan was vacillating a bit, but nothing came of it. I'm glad now, because I really want the current book to be the first one I publish here.
There is also a half-finished one about an exchange student coming to live with a New Zealand family which is languishing in a drawer ... and one that I really want to pursue when this one is well and truly done, which I won't expand on because of my superstition that that would jinx it somehow.
(I won't go too deeply into the hideously embarrassing historical romance I wrote when I was fourteen ... that one will never see the light of day. Oh, and the fantasy novel I wrote when I was eleven. Actually, the one I wrote when I was six might be worth printing. I think it was about ten pages long and boasted the gripping plot of me finding a unicorn in the garden. One of the characters was a fairy called Angel. Or possibly an angel called Fairy. I forget.)
I did want to upload a list of books that I have found particularly inspiring, though, in terms of their writing style. I feel an affinity with writers whose style is lyrical, vivid and quite spare ... I admire Tolkien's decision to use strong, Anglo-Saxon words that have more punch than the more flowery French ones that came into the language with the Norman invasion.
Anyway, here they are (the ones I can think of at this moment, anyway):
The Bone People - Keri Hulme
The Sparrow - Mary Doria Russell
A Passage to India - E.M. Forster
The Last Unicorn - Peter S. Beagle
What I Loved - Siri Hustvedt
Ladder of Years - Anne Tyler
If I think of any more, I'll add them ... the sun has cooked my brain somewhat today.
Oh, and worth mentioning for fantastic first-person narration:
Tamsin - Peter S. Beagle
I Capture the Castle - Dodie Smith
Mukiwa - Peter Godwin
And as you can see, the word count has climbed to 61,000! Hurrah.
I have just been looking at the information in my right-hand sidebar. It's a little misleading. I have published one novel, yes, and I am working on a new one, but in-between those two points there are all kinds of finished and half-finished projects. There's the sequel to the published book, and the half-finished third one (it was intended to be a trilogy, though each book stands alone), which will never get published now as: a) publishing books in Zim, where the first one came out, is no longer viable; and b) I wrote the sequels when I was sixteen, and if I read them now I would probably cringe and bury them in the garden. Since then I have also written two young adult fantasy novels: The Story Spinners (which I always mean to go back and revise); and Destiny, which I sent off to a few publishers a couple of years ago. Destiny generated some interest, and Macmillan was vacillating a bit, but nothing came of it. I'm glad now, because I really want the current book to be the first one I publish here.
There is also a half-finished one about an exchange student coming to live with a New Zealand family which is languishing in a drawer ... and one that I really want to pursue when this one is well and truly done, which I won't expand on because of my superstition that that would jinx it somehow.
(I won't go too deeply into the hideously embarrassing historical romance I wrote when I was fourteen ... that one will never see the light of day. Oh, and the fantasy novel I wrote when I was eleven. Actually, the one I wrote when I was six might be worth printing. I think it was about ten pages long and boasted the gripping plot of me finding a unicorn in the garden. One of the characters was a fairy called Angel. Or possibly an angel called Fairy. I forget.)
Conversation with LOML while gardening
Me: You know, gardening makes me think profound thoughts.
LOML (busily engaged with trying to cut out an old, dead root): Really? Like what?
Me: Just ... profound things. About Life.
LOML: Okay.
Me: For example, I was just thinking about my wedding ring.
LOML: Okay ...
Me: I could have taken it off before gardening, but I didn't. Now it's all covered in dirt.
LOML: Right ...
Me: So it's symbolic. We'll go through rough times in our marriage when the shine goes off things, but instead of taking the rings off altogether we'll just work through them.
LOML: And then we'll rinse them off.
Me: Well ... yes.
LOML: And maybe get them professionally cleaned.
Me: I think we're stretching this analogy a little too far.
LOML: You started it.
Silence.
LOML: And it's all worth it, because at the end we'll have made a beautiful garden together.
Me: Now you're getting the idea. See? I told you. Profound thoughts.
LOML (busily engaged with trying to cut out an old, dead root): Really? Like what?
Me: Just ... profound things. About Life.
LOML: Okay.
Me: For example, I was just thinking about my wedding ring.
LOML: Okay ...
Me: I could have taken it off before gardening, but I didn't. Now it's all covered in dirt.
LOML: Right ...
Me: So it's symbolic. We'll go through rough times in our marriage when the shine goes off things, but instead of taking the rings off altogether we'll just work through them.
LOML: And then we'll rinse them off.
Me: Well ... yes.
LOML: And maybe get them professionally cleaned.
Me: I think we're stretching this analogy a little too far.
LOML: You started it.
Silence.
LOML: And it's all worth it, because at the end we'll have made a beautiful garden together.
Me: Now you're getting the idea. See? I told you. Profound thoughts.
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