This Itch of Writing

Not so much a bloggy week as a giggy one

Considering I'd assumed I was in something of a lull between books, I'm actually slightly busy on the author-in-public front, which is why I've been neglecting the blog. Despite my grumbling about the business (and I do mean business) of selling one's authorly personality and experience, as opposed to selling my books, I really enjoy the readings-and-signings side of it, because that (and the comments here) is when I actually meet people who've read my work: that's when you really feel that what you've been saying is being heard.

On Saturday I went to a conference at the University of Bedford on postgraduate creative writing: What is it? Is it inherently a paradox to try to create art in the academy? And lots of conversations about what-does-your-PhD-involve-then? The answers to the last question were interesting not just by way of swapping traveller's tales, but becausethe ideas - and regulations - of what constitutes a CW PhD are very varied, and so what we have to do is very varied too. Some fine arguments broke out over the coffee and sandwiches, which is just as it should be.

Then this evening I was at writLOUD, combining the launch of the Birkbeck MA's first published graduates, and a celebration of five years of writLOUD, which as well as showcasing Birkbeck and friends also supports Oxfam. There was great work read by Sally Hinchcliffe, Niki Aguirre and Matthew Loukes (can't find a link, I'm afraid) in the bar of RADA, which is a very nice and rather glamorous space compared to the hallowed but worn 1930s look that I remember from auditioning there, many years ago. For once, too, it had an excellent sound system: trust a theatre to do that properly! As is the way, I went with Debi Alper from Bloggers With Book Deals, joined up by pre-arrangement with another writing friend, and promptly bumped into a fourth BWBDer, (Sally's one too), Sarah Salway, someone I met on Saturday, and several other people I know. The writing world's a small one.

That was, if you like, past and present. As far as future's concerned, next is the quarterly Pipe and Slippers, a delightful Sunday afternoon of poetry, prose, acoustic music, chocolate cake and full bar, all in a Victorian pub in Nunhead in South East London. The next one is on Sunday 1st June, doors open at 3pm, and among a varied bill, I'll be reading from The Mathematics of Love and A Secret Alchemy. So if you fancy dropping by (all the details of how to get there are on their website) do come and say hello.

Slipstreaming Eagleton and selling your soul

To Goldsmiths yesterday evening, for a lecture by the literary and cultural critic Terry Eagleton. Apart from knowing his name in connection with swathes of literary theory, combatively expressed, which I haven't read (I haven't read much of anyone else's literary theory, it has to be said) I didn't really know what to expect. In the event it was the kind of talk you wish you could have recorded, to go over more than once, spreading out the densely-argued points, gathering together arguments that ranged over an astonishingly wide area, and seeing whether it really is as persuasive as it seemed at the time. I suspect much of it would be, and it was also funny.

I still find that most literary criticism, however interesting it is in and of itself, and be it Formalist, or New, or Structuralist, or whatever, says very little to me about what I, as a novelist, spend my time thinking about. But one thing Eagleton said really rang a bell. He was talking about how literary criticism as anyone over forty remembers it - "the minute dissection of discourse" - is dying on its feet. Other, cultural concerns about gender, or sex, or colonialism - fascinating and legitimate in themselves - have taken over as the focus of literary study. He linked this with Walter Benjamin's analysis that in late capitalist societies like ours, when markets have evolved for everything else we can make or do or own, including art, finally human experience itself is commoditised: made into something that can be bought or sold or destroyed or controlled. For this to happen, said Benjamin writing (and dying) as a Jew under Nazism, will be the death of memory and mourning, and therefore of our authentic, subjective, individual human nature and experience.

Studies of the cultural discourse in literature can't alone recapture that subjective individuality, said Eagleton, can't pin down the affective process of reading, can't explain how reading makes us feel what we feel when we read. Only recapturing the detailed processes of language - tone, metaphor, pitch, syntax, rhythm and so on - can enable us to understand and hold onto the mechanisms of transmitting true experience. So, here was the once-upon-a-time enfant terrible of Structuralism - that bogey-man of everyone who still wants to discuss whether Jane should have married Rochester -  saying two things that go straight to the heart of me as a writer.

One: that close reading still matters, because all creative writing is close writing. What we do, word by word, how we chose, discard, speak aloud or brood over individual sentences and paragraphs, is how we transmit the experience we're trying to evoke, whether it's running for a bus or flying a spaceship or giving birth. It's no good trying to write grand ideas and meta-narratives, tragedy or comedy or simply the recognisable textures of everyday life, if they can't be transmitted; if the signals, as it were, are anything less than exquisitely clear.

And Two: that the obsession with the un-invented roots of fiction, the 'real' authenticity, about which I've grumbled in Rogues and Vagabonds  and No Place for the Muffins is, indeed, not a simple matter of 'I need the publicity', or 'Why shouldn't I thank everyone who's helped?', understandable though both those motivations are. You could argue (but I probably only do in my own most combative moments) that talking publicly about which of your 'real' experiences went into the novel, or acknowledging all the incredibly helpful neighbours/family/guinea pigs who went into the making of this book, is actually taking part in the commoditising of experience. By offering your 'real' experience to back up the infinitely more detailed and true evocation of human experience that you've spent a year or more inventing, you're playing the market, offering your personal humanness for sale, instead of your art. The stage we've reached so far is the celebrity culture, the reality TV show, and the misery memoir, which are clearly three commodities in the 'real experience' market. It seems that fiction writers are expected to join in. But what will we do, once we've sold our personal, subjective experience? No matter that once that's happened no one will read our fiction for what fiction does best: creating an authentic, detailed discourse of the human experience that no mere autobiography can hope to match. It'll be too late then to find that we've commoditised our souls.

Drilling deep

But if I was arguing in Trust me, I'm telling stories for being allowed to play fast and loose with historical (or, indeed, any other) facts, I do see that there's not a lot of point in fiction that doesn't grapple with the realities of human existence in some way. It doesn't need Bruno Bettelheim to tell us that even fairy stories say important things to us: that enchantment has its uses. A fairy story may also be - pace Freud - a growing-up myth; many an opera - pace Jung - is an integration of animus and anima; and a well-crafted modern comedy makes us laugh at our uneasily comfortable modern lives which we never thought to laugh about. And that's not to exclude the science fiction and fantasy branches of the fiction tree either: it's simply that they play by different set of rules about what's defined as 'believable' - dragons, for instance.

So even though the definition of a novelist's trade could be that We Make Things Up, any novel needs a bedrock of human existence - human truth, if not historical or geographical fact - because without it fiction is pointless. The difficulty is that every reader has a very slightly different frame of reference for testing such truth, based on a slightly different experience of the world. Write about what you can make me believe you know is my slogan for aspiring writers, but what I'll believe as a reader is as much about me as it is about you. I never did discover what it was about Anna, in The Mathematics of Love, that meant a fellow-workshopper didn't believe she'd been brought up on a council estate, but since the others in the workshop did believe she had, I didn't feel obliged to re-write Anna, or her childhood.

That ought to mean that the further away the world of a novel is from the world of its readers, the faster and looser I can play with mere facts, without shaking my readers' faith in that bedrock of human truth, because who can tell me I'm 'wrong'? But, lacking the believability so easily established (in theory) by the novelist of modern life with an Ordnance Survey map and a bit of eavesdropping on buses, you can argue that those of us who set our fiction in other worlds - the past, the future, different continents or different galaxies - have to drill even deeper into human bedrock before we can start to build our story.

Trust me, I'm telling stories

I've just realised that this is my hundredth blog post, so thank you to everyone who's dropped by, read, commented, linked, or just said something that got me intrigued and sent me over here to work out what I think. For example:

Poet Sheenagh Pugh has been blogging here about Linda Grant's piece in The Guardian that also set me off on Rogues and Vagabonds. It's apparently even harder to persuade readers of poetry that the persona in the poem is not the poet, than it is to persuade the readers of novels that the author made it up. And then on Friday I had a drink for the first time in ages with a short-story-writing friend. She has an extremely high-powered professional life and a large family, and she writes strange, dark stories which don't spring directly from her everyday life, and would completely change how people saw her if they read them. So she writes under a pseudonym, and I sympathise hugely with that, and not just because negotiating contracts is hard to do with someone who's read your stories of... well, that would be telling. No, not just because it's bad for business: consciousness of external scrutiny of what you're doing (as opposed to consciousness of the need to communicate what you want to say) is creative disaster.

Meanwhile, she was sympathising with me about the fact that the advance reading copies (bound proofs to you and me) of A Secret Alchemy should be going out any day now. I'm bracing myself, not just because the early reviews - the ones the book trade reads - won't be long behind, but as anyone must brace themselves who writes any fiction rooted in well-known facts. To hear some - many - readers of historical fiction, you'd think that accurate facts are what they're looking for, and in some ways it is. It's frightening how many lovers of historical fiction were completely turned of real history by bad teaching at school. They still want their history fix, though, so the history in a novel is what matters to them, not the fiction. Of course I have my professional pride, and I hope I haven't got any facts wrong that I meant to get right. But I hope more that people read A Secret Alchemy as I meant it to be: a story. It's not history, though it has its roots in history. It's fiction, and anyone who wants history should go and read a history book: I made this up.

And I suddenly realised that so many fiction-readers read not to be transported elsewhere, as we all were so easily in childhood, but to get a fix of non-fiction: history, geography, science or a dozen other subjects in easy-to-swallow form. No wonder they're so upset when they realise that something isn't true in the factual sense. As well as all the reasons I touched on in 'Rogues and Vagabonds', I find this attitude annoying because it ignores what fiction is for, and if the author gets it wrong, it takes their fiction to task for not being what it was never meant to be. To my mind, if you want history, read history, if you want geography, read travel books. They're stories too, of course - though they play by different rules - because humans are story-telling creatures and we have no other way of making sense of our experience.

I'm telling stories by fiction rules, and I make no promises about what's true and what isn't in what I write, but only that I'll make that call as seems best to me at the time. All I promise is that, of itself, the story will be whole, will make sense, will be true to human experience, will satisfy you, the reader, as real life - real history - so often doesn't. Trust me, I'm telling stories.

Seized with desire

Over at Vulpes Libris there's an excellent interview with Susan Barrett, author of Fixing Shadows and The Inconstant Husband and, incidentally, a stablemate of mine at Headline Review. At one point she steps away from the questions and says, 'What fun writing this - it is a nice opportunity to post-rationalise, a bit of literary onanism.' Which made me laugh, but also got me thinking.

I guess whether we should pursue that precise analogy does depend on what you think of onanism as a form of pleasure, but post-rationalising is an interesting business. Yes, it's fun, though there are people who might say that writing 30,000 words of PhD commentary has to be the ultimate - um - well, you know what I mean. There's certainly a strong argument that, as Umberto Eco says in his essay 'Reflections on The Name of the Rose', 'The author must not interpret': that is, must not tell readers what to think of the book. And I do believe that to write a book in order to have interesting PhD-ish or even Vulpes-Libris-ish things to say about it would be a betrayal of what art is for, and comes perilously close to the recent Booker-winner who apparently half-admitted that s/he had written that book in order to win prizes. I also doubt if it would end up being a very good book.

But Eco goes on to say that even if the author must not interpret 'he [sic] may tell why and how he wrote his book'. If there is a whiff of self-admiration, of self-absorption in such telling, it's only really the self-consciousness of anyone who is asked to answer a question: the admiration and absorption is originally the questioner's. Deciding to write a novel is partly a matter of setting yourself a series of questions at different levels, from how did they get here and what happens next, to who's telling this story and is it past or present to them. The solution to these problems is the novel. Think of it that way, and talking about why and how you wrote it is merely another level of questions and answers.

If you can lay hands on a copy, I highly recommend Eco's brief account of writing his first, mega-selling novel. It's a while, I realised, since I read The Name of the Rose itself, but Eco's stylishly written and thought-provoking little essay has brought it all back. So I looked for the novel on my shelves, and realised, eventually, that I've never actually owned a copy: I must have borrowed my father's, which means I read it at least twenty-two years ago. It feels like eighteen months at the most: now that's a tribute to how much it gripped me at the time. Eco's account of it is delightful partly because, although his cultural, literary and theoretical erudition leaves the rest of us gasping, he still has to deal with the practicalities of his first novel as we all do: he bumps into the same problems, finds the same solutions, is constrained inconveniently as we are by the historical record, realises too late how last minute additions are being interpreted by others. All in all, there's something very delightful about the fact that even a professor of semiotics will admit to being seized with the desire to write a novel, 'Because I felt like poisoning a monk.'

Becoming a walker

I was just racking my brains for something interesting to post last night, when the rain stopped. So I went out for a walk instead. It had been one of those dull days in all senses - hence the lack of bloggy inspiration - much taken up with post offices, photocopiers, supermarkets and misbehaving computers. So even though it was dark by then, and still damp, and there was only time for a quick loop of one of my usual walks where the terrain and the timing are completely familiar, it was good to get out with no more paraphernalia than a house key and a fiver in my pocket.

Sometimes, on such a duty walk, I take with me something to think about, (similarly my father used to take a couple of Times crossword clues in his head to work on) but I had no particular knot to unpick last night. So I was striding along, not deliberately thinking about anything, when I remembered something in Dorothea Brande's Becoming a Writer, still the classic how-to-write book and to my mind one of the few worth taking to heart. She tells a story from when she was teaching creative writing at night school in New York in the 1930s. One of Brande's students was a single parent with several children and absolutely no money. Her life was incredibly hard, it was terribly difficult for her to find the time and the energy to write, but the class was the one thing she did for herself. And then good fortune came to this woman: she married again and had plenty of time and money. 'But when will I do my thinking,' she said, 'now I've got nothing to scrub?'

Brande's book, if you haven't come across it (or even if you have) isn't about how to shape your plot or character, or pick the right word or the lucrative market, let alone get an agent or a deal. It's about, literally, becoming a writer: how you open the trap doors in yourself that are normally kept locked by years of conditioning or lack of confidence, by a misplaced puritanism or a ferocious Inner Critic. Then, through those trap doors will come... whatever comes. That's frightening stuff, but the moment when you stare at the page and realise you don't know where those words came from is the moment you become a writer.

Rhythm, Brande suggests, is one of the things which unlocks those doors, whether you find it in scrubbing a floor or swimming ten lengths. Walking is one of the most fundamental rhythms of all and one of the easiest to make happen. Trainers, jacket, and you're off. Even before the exercise endorphins kick in my mind is slipping loose from its moorings, floating off, jumping the tracks, going off-piste...

And a last thought: isn't it interesting that the metaphors that occurred to me for that sensation are all about the physical experience of travelling? To go on a journey is often used as a metaphor for inner, emotional and spiritual change, but the word also implies a destination and perhaps a route, even if it's a hazy one. I think I've used the metaphor before on here that most closely describes how writing novels feels to me: like making for a mountain top I can see, but by way of a whole landscape of sunken lanes, crossroads, fords and even villages that I can't. Now, where did I put my walking boots?

That's it, almost certainly

So that's it, almost certainly: I've crawled through the proofs of A Secret Alchemy, finding every last misplaced comma, although it's also gone to a professional proofreader; I've picked up a couple of little anomalies that somehow between us we've all managed to miss; I've seen for the first time how the changes I made at the copy-editing stage integrate when I read it straight through; I've to-ed and fro-ed quadruple-checking the days of the week for one strand, and in another I've realised I've married the Duke of Buckingham to the wrong Woodville sister. The last real job is done, and the beast is face-down on my desk, waiting to go back to Headline, special delivery.

All being well, that's the end of my dealings with the actual words of A Secret Alchemy. From now on I'll be reading them aloud, discussing them, talking to people who've read them, nervously scanning reviews about them, but I won't be involved with them in the way that you are when you're writing. With a whimper (all those toings and froings) and something of a bang (it's a long time since I read it straight through, and d'you know, I really think it works), it has become a separate entity.

I'm glad. There isn't suddenly a book-shaped hole in my life as there is when you finish the real, mad, obsessive writing of a novel, and move onto the editorial stage. Rather, for some months now I've just wanted it to get out there, to be published, to free me to start the new novel. A Secret Alchemy hasn't been the easiest of novels to write - sometimes I wish that the thing that makes me want to write a book wasn't a deep unease about whether I can pull it off or not - and it's time I moved on.

But as all one's novels are, this one was written in - I could even say written by - a particular stage of my life. What's ended up in the book, and what was in there but got cut in revising, is nothing that anyone else would recognise as autobiographical, but how it is on the page is how I once was. That's the oddity: it's as if we co-existed for a while, but soon our existences will separate. And so, in stuffing a few hundred photocopied pages into a jiffy bag and going down to the post office, I'm saying goodbye to a part of my life. As grown-up, photographer Anna puts it at the beginning of The Mathematics of Love:

It was then - that moment - that the shutter opened, and snatched a scatter of the light and dark, throwing it on to this piece of glass, fixing the sun and shadow of those few seconds for ever. And then the sun moved on and took the day with it, while the plate held those shadows and kept them, and carried them to other places and to other times.

Another, different voice

You may remember a while ago that I posted a piece, Messes, Clones and Plots like a W, about why I think it's so important to understand technical things about how writing works, to work hard on how you understand them and how you put them into practice, but not to allow them to become rules to be 'kept' or 'broken'. In writing there are no rules, except possibly the one about starting at the top left-hand corner of the page, but only different ways to write different things, some of which work better than others. To refuse the concept of rules doesn't mean abandoning all judgement or discussion of good and bad writing, just making it much more nuanced, and so much more useful.

When she's not writing novels about politics (More Than Love Letters) and campuses (Hearts and Minds), with a warm heart and a satirical pen, Rosy Thornton is a law lecturer. She posted this in the private members' section of WriteWords, and I think it's the most interesting thing I've read in ages about the whole thorny question of 'the rules', and why they seem so alien to some, and so comfortable to others. You have to start by understanding something that she posted later in the discussion:

The anti-essentialist argument [that not all women - or men - are the same] is a very handy one for ignoring the female perspective (or the black perspective or any other perspective outside the domiannt discourse). Well, the point is not that all men think like x or all women think like y. But that - statistically and observably and demonstrably, according to psychologists and anthropologists and others who have studied it - women as a group think differently from men."

Having cleared that up, here's Rosy's piece:

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"If I were blogging, I would head it: ARE THE CW RULES GENDERED?

Time and again I find myself balking at the CW ‘rules’ – both the individual rules themselves and also, possibly, the very notion of there being any rules. But I haven’t ever really thought about why that might be. But here’s a possible theory. It begins with a diversion, so please bear with me.

In the rest of my life I spend a lot of time dealing with rules, because I teach Law, and Law is essentially a set of rules. I also teach Women and Law, in which students are encouraged to challenge the rules from a gender perspective: both the content of the specific rules, which have historically operated to the disadvantage of women in many respects, and the very idea of the rules themselves, in the way they are currently conceptualised. The common law works from the premise that situations (real life, complex, messy situations) can be distilled down into simple, sharp-edged paradigms, from which lawyers can reason and according to which future cases can be decided, and rules can evolve. Feminists have rejected this mode of reasoning – epitomised by legal rules but found throughout the social sciences – as ‘male’.

American psychologist Carol Gilligan wrote a book in the 1980s called In a Different Voice. Her thesis is that the two genders think in wholly different ways – something I have to say that rings true with all my own lived experience. Gilligan interviewed children in the schoolyard. She asked them all the question, ‘Would it be justified to steal bread if your children were starving?’ Of the boys, some said yes and some said no. But the majority of the girls said neither. Instead, they worked their way round the question. They said, ‘Surely there must be another way’ and ‘what if you were to explain to the baker about the starving children…?’ In other words they refused to accept such a simplified, black-and-white scenario as being true to life – the exact kind of scenario which is the daily tool of legal reasoning and the basis of all legal rules. Rather, they viewed things as contingent, as muddy, as nuanced, as negotiable.

So, if women think and reason differently from men, do they also speak and write differently? Do they have, quite literally, ‘a different voice’? And if so, what impact does that have on how women write – or how anyone writes if they are trying to get inside a female character and to explore the female experience?

This brings me to the point: the so-called CW rules. Let’s think about some of them. We are told, for example, that modal constructions are to be avoided. Don’t say ‘she could see the mountains, say ‘she saw the mountains. It is stronger writing, we are told – more direct, more pacy, more powerful – ‘better’ writing. Similarly we are told, don’t use lots of subordinate clauses, especially those beginning with a present participle – ‘ing’ clauses are weak and therefore bad. Stick as often as possible to the finite verb. Not ‘gazing out of the window, she saw the mountains’ but ‘she gazed from the window; she saw the mountains.’ But what if rather than strength and directness what you want to achieve is something softer – dare I say, more ‘feminine’? Maybe if I’m writing in a female voice (female character, and first person or close-in third) then my writing patterns should mirror the way a women thinks, the way she experiences the world – which is often (in my experience) packed full of contingency and uncertainty and tentativity and conditionality.

More fundamentally, what about the ‘rule’ that says we should pare down, write sparely, make sure that every word is necessary, every word is doing a job. Why? Research shows that over the course of a day women speak many, many more words, on average, than men. Surely ‘not wasting words’ is a very male ideal? I know that I talk nineteen to the dozen for large parts of the day. I know, for example, that when teaching, sometimes if I say the same thing three times over in different ways, it gives people more chance to grasp what I mean. Effective communication can be effusive, it can be sprawling, it can be full of doubt and wondering and even contradiction, and out of the morass emerges understanding - and perhaps it might even be a more nuanced understanding, a warmer and more humane one, than the one which emerges from a fewer, and superficially clearer, set of words.

That’s what I reckon, anyway. Basically: we women are wafflers, so waffling reflects our lives and our voice.

Er, that was it, really."
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William & Mary will have to wait

This morning I got up earlier than I consider altogether decent for a Saturday morning, in order to drive to Hampton Court to do some research. It was cold and grey, with dull light and a nasty east wind, and there was scarcely anyone about except for security people with their coats buttoned up to their chins and an air of bracing themselves for the day as much as the weather. I found my way through arches and past gates as instructed, collected my pass, and trudged past the backs of low buildings - storehouses, offices, goods yards and so on - and through the gardens. Under not-yet-leafed trees what must have been spectacular carpets of daffodils are brown and shrivelled now: between them a few bluebells are showing. Seemingly miles away, and far above our heads, the roof of the Tudor hall and the chimneys and pinnacles of the great gateways are elaborate and remote: an untidy accumulation of Wolsey's blood-coloured grandeur, staring down everyone who approaches. I could smell the woodsmoke where they were lighting the fires in Henry VIII's kitchens. It began to rain.

Through a door in a wall, and round a corner and a couple of centuries, the long, long William & Mary front stretches away. The cream-coloured pillars and windows and even the clipped baytrees are as regular as a regiment, eyes fixed on the prospect across the formal garden. It must often have been as cold and grey for them on ordinary days: not rich or sunlit or exciting, just working days. I turned under a portico, beyond which in a courtyard a fountain was being thrown about by the wind, so that the noise echoed around among the pillars while I looked for the right door. It was tucked in a corner and I knocked, bare knuckles on old, hard wood. Of course: how else could I summon the inhabitants of a place like this?

Hampton Court has two faces, their backs joined but their gaze in opposite directions. I love the place, but today this doubleness of aspect and character was confusing. The glamour and violence of Elysabeth and Antony's world in A Secret Alchemy is not distant in time or nature from Henry's, and that's where I should be, that's the world I've lived in for so long. But the clean, clear rhythm of Wren's palace speaks to me of the world I want to enter: the ordering of science, the balance and elegance of form, the confidence of reason. It's not as simple as that, of course. The late fifteenth century saw the beginnings of humanism, of scientific enquiry, of classical scholarship and modern economics: you can read their words, and understand. The late seventeenth century was still a land of witch-hunts, starvation, heresy and violence, and they're so often still blind to what we can see so clearly. But each world for me has its own particular texture of smell and colour and sound: music, too, and a certain feeling on the skin.

But I can't live in two places at once. Treading along the thick, shifting gravel of the paths I felt unsteady, unreal, as you do on a long journey, suspended between two places which hold two separate meanings. No, I can't work if I have to gaze in two opposite directions. Much of me wants to: in many ways I've cast off from Here - A Secret Alchemy - and want to get There and settle down. But there's a lot to do still, Here, and I want to do it properly, because I've lived here too long to ride off without a backward glance. William and Mary will have to wait.

Not exactly simple

The proofs of A Secret Alchemy have arrived but, come hell or high water, Thursday is PhD day so I haven't looked at them properly yet. It will be interesting to go through them, because it must be a couple of months since I've looked at the actual text, which is probably the longest gap since I started writing it. For the commentary on it that I'm writing for my PhD, I'm in the odd position of noticing things as a student of literature that I never noticed when I was writing it. But for proof checking I need a completely different mindset: a cold, uninvolved eye that notices typos (increasingly rare thanks to spell-checkers), but also a mind making slightly more sense of it all, so that I see literals (not rare at all because spell-checkers are blind to homophones and textual idiocies) and slips of typography - the italics that bleed on even when the quoted letter is done, the missing squiggle between two voices - that only I will recognise. Now that teaching and marking at Goldsmiths is done with, it's all less panic-stricken, but I still found myself noticing with slightly wary interest just how many different elements make up a week of the writing life:

• sandwich lunch tomorrow to advise aspiring-writer-friend of acquaintance
• giving back essays with appropriate helpful (if also admonitory) comments
• Phd commentary - another 2,000 words today about parallel narrative in A Secret Alchemy
• checking proofs of A Secret Alchemy - a day's work at least
• reading the current research book for the new, nameless novel - not much more to read
• a flurry of emails about the design of the cover for A Secret Alchemy, including me digging out and sending some links to images Headline and the designer (the same as for The Mathematics of Love - hooray!) might not have already
• reading fiction for the Phd commentary: at the moment According to Queenie by Beryl Bainbridge, Arthur and George by Julian Barnes and The Stone Virgin by Barry Unsworth
• researching lit. crit. books for the issues I want to discuss in the PhD commentary. Anyone know if there's any discussion of parallel narrative as a form, or shall I have to plough my way through thousands of irrelevant papers about books which happen to have parallel narratives, in search of the odd paragraph or sentence?
• ditto historical fiction which includes real historical characters
• returning some shockingly overdue books which were research for the new novel to the Goldsmiths library and paying the fine
• going to the London Library to borrow the same and some others because they don't charge fines and have a far bigger collection
• resisting the super-tempting next research book for the new novel
• thinking hard about whether to apply for the vacancy the Open University has announced for online lecturers in creative writing: would it be valuable experience and money, or The Last Straw?
• find scissors to cut a non-fiction review out of the TLS which is relevant to the new novel and put cutting in that folder
• obsessive checking of email to see if the final cover's for A Secret Alchemy has come through
• obsessive checking of email to see if my US editor has sent the notes she's working on
• obsessive checking of email to see if Radio Four producer has sent list of topics we discussed for short programme
• fossicking with PayPal because they've demanded half a dozen kinds of authentication to comply (they say) with money laundering regulations. I only set the darned thing up because it seemed the best way of dealing with payments for editorial reports. I wish I hadn't bothered but stuck to cheques instead
• suppressing ideas (prompted by fellow writer's agonies over Second Novel Syndrome) about the book on creative writing which I want to write
• ditto the book on historical fiction I want to write
• ditto the panic that after the new novel, I might never have another novel to write again. I know perfectly well that as soon as I enter the doldrums of that one - about half-way into the first draft - something new and sparkly and much more fun will begin to clamour. But at the moment it's a blank
• writing another blog post

And that's before I've done the laundry, cooked the supper, gone to the supermarket, checked if it's true that the car needs to have its MOT done, acknowledged the children's existence, and ignored the fact that the house has subsidence and the lawn needs mowing.

No, I'm not complaining. It was much less fun being unpublished. But it's not exactly simple either.