One last gasp

Two full weeks before the first week of classes. They include a dissertation defense and a number of meetings of one kind or another, but I am still hopeful that I can get in one last gulp of work before the roller-coaster takes off....

(Minor Works and Pride and Prejudice are at the office I think - will have a foray there tomorrow to collect!)

This is for a book proposal that I am determined to get out by the beginning of September. Additional incentive provided by the fact that I am signed up for an October departmental work-in-progress talk, and I've already committed my Johnson-Shakespeare stuff to the Book History Colloquium (spring schedule isn't yet posted), so I really need to be able to present this project instead: a hard deadline will concentrate the mind like nobody's business!

It is my eternal regret that I habitually let so many summer days go by without tapping into the vein of maniacal productivity; it was a stress factor in June and July that I had to prepare that talk for Oxford, but really in the end I was extremely glad of it, as it meant I did a good chunk of research and drafting (chaotically, under the gun) in a summer that otherwise might have passed by without me getting much traction on anything in particular. If I can just get this one thing done additionally, I will feel OK about summer accomplishments.

Light reading round-up

I haven't had a huge amount of time for light reading as I am still ploughing through Clarissa! About 70% through, and quota (in the form of notes rather than draft in this case) is piling up nicely* - I am sorry to say that I resolutely ignored various other work-related imperatives until they became so strong that I could no longer postpone them....

Had a useful day Friday sorting out a lot of the remaining stuff for my new lecture course - it is the sort of thing that will take up as much time as you let it, the only way to hold on to real writing time in August is to put this stuff out of mind, though I felt very guilty leaving it so late (it is inconvenient and stressful for the seminar leaders I will be working with!).

Hoping to finish with Clarissa before I return to New York on Wednesday (I have it divided into ten sections for teaching purposes and am following those divisions here too, reading a chunk and then typing up notes while the thoughts are fresh in my mind), but I also still have three more tenure letters that I'd like to get done before school starts (have done most of the work on one, but since it is not the one due this coming Monday, that's not as useful as you might think).

The Swift conference paper is clearly not going to get written this month, but that's OK, have been reading Anthony Grafton on footnotes and thinking about various things to do with Swift and commentary. Can do this after my classes are underway and I have done both of my September triathlons: it makes sense for me to choose races for early fall, as I have much more training time over the summer than during the school year, but it is a pity to have the attention divided between starting school and big races - it will be good when I am over that particular hump!

A couple highlights of recreational reading around the edges:

First of all, Kipling's Kim. It is such a strong source of inspiration for so much contemporary genre fiction (Tim Powers' excellent Declare was the one that most recently brought it to mind, but it's hugely important for Laurie King's Holmes books and crops up in all sorts of other places as well). I must have read it once or twice as a child, but it's not one of the ones I know really well (that would be the Just-So Stories, from early childhood, and then the glorious Puck of Pook's Hill and Rewards and Fairies, which I reread every two years when we visited our English grandparents' house). It is amazingly good, so much so that I think I might need to start rereading a lot of Kipling and Chesterton in lieu of sometimes mediocre recent stuff. Most eloquent and evocative object/image: Kim's "little Survey paint-box of six colour-cakes and three brushes"....

Judy Melinek and T. J. Mitchell, Working Stiff - very good book by a former NY medical examiner about the work she does. I love this stuff, and the book's gripping and worthwhile in any case, but the account of the aftermath of the World Trade Center attacks is especially interesting - would be worth reading the book for that alone, I think. (I am laughing, this one also called my thoughts back to another favorite book of childhood: Mostly Murder, the autobiography of pathologist Sydney Smith!

A couple other novels worthy of note: Marcus Guillory, Red Now and Laters, which I acquired because of the title and very much enjoyed, especially in its account of childhood in Houston in the 1970s and early 1980s - it is overwritten/lyrical in parts, but I am willing to forgive that when there is so much else to like; and the long-awaited last installment of Lev Grossman's Magicians trilogy, The Magician's Land.

These can really only be described as "fodder": Patrick Lee, The Breach (not sure about this one, a bit too grandiose for me in its schemes, though he is certainly a good storyteller); and Melissa Olson, Dead Spots (nothing wrong with it, an enjoyable read, but I fear it is rather the sort of book that makes me feel I am rotting my brain!).

* Tracking quota August 2014

8/8/2014 2194 words (lost a few?)
8/10/2014 7687 words (through end of ONE)
8/11/2014 reading day
8/12/2014 12628 words (through end of TWO)
8/13/2014 reading day
8/14/2014 18117 (through end of THREE)
8/15/2014 reading day
8/16/2014 20217 (through end of FOUR)
8/17/2014 reading day
8/18/2014 23474 (through end of FIVE)
8/19/2014 26599 (through end of SIX)
8/20/2014 reading day and first half of typing
8/21/2014 31752 (through end of SEVEN)
8/22/2014 LTCM work

The thrill

of opening a new folder on my computer for a fresh book project, creating new files and typing up 2500 words in the first day's production of quota!

Working in this ad hoc fashion is going to lead to a huge and chaotic draft, I'm afraid, but I want to get a proper start on this now so as to maximize the chance that I will be able to write some pages every week in the spring semester as I am teaching Clarissa.

Why, oh why is August already so far underway?!?

I have two more full weeks in Cayman, plus a weekend and a few days of a subsequent week, twenty-two days all told: if twenty of those days involve the successful production of quota, it is possible that I could have a partial draft of 40-50K by the time I go back to New York, even if it's mostly going to have to be cut and rewritten later on - but I just don't feel right without a book in progress!

Locked-in syndrome

A very different approach to the production of quota.

Update

My Austen draft is now over the 2000-word mark, which given that I'm shooting for 6000-7500 words should mean (in theory!) that it's roughly a third of the way done.  I think I can get much of the rest written tomorrow: I'll certainly be happier if I can leave for Ottawa with the piece mostly drafted. 

(I may be able to get some more writing done on Saturday, as I'm arriving in the late morning, about twelve hours before B. will get there, and haven't made any plans for the day other than perhaps a notional yoga class if I can get organized for it; on the other hand, my flight leaves so early from Newark airport that I've booked a car to pick me up at 6am, so it may not be realistic to think of later-day productivity given likelihood of little to no sleep.)

I had a two-hour run on the schedule for this morning, but felt too anxious about the unwritten nature of the Austen essay to indulge my conviction that running first thing in the day is the best way to get it done.  Will head out in about twenty minutes and feel quite glad now that I waited, as it has been near-torrentially rainy all day but significantly lightened in last hour.  I like running in the rain, but a two-hour very rainy run is likely to leave one excessively chafed as well as sodden....

Chewing through glitches

Margo Lanagan on writing.  (Via Theodora Goss.)  My daily quota is usually only about half the amount Margo mentions (I often set it at 1500 words, which I find comfortably easy i.e. sustainable over a period of weeks, and I will set it lower - 1000 - if I am feeling any strain), but I second what she says, that there's no point going over one's daily quota because it only involves getting a sloppy version that is essentially subtracted from what one can produce the next day. 

I should add that I have always been a huge skeptic about the notion that one should write every day: it simply doesn't seem to take into account life's complexities, desirable and otherwise.  I remember Lee Child saying at a publicity event for one of the Jack Reacher novels that he'd written it in 81 days of writing, not consecutive but nearly so (it is not always practical to write on, say, Thanksgiving).  He writes one of those books each year, not more; Iain Banks, too, writes a draft of a new novel in about three months.  A recharging spell is then desirable.

I write something every day (blogs, emails, lectures, letters of recommendation, reviews, interviews, etc.), and obviously I'm constantly reading and would experience a day without reading as one of mighty deprivation, but I am by no means constantly working actively on a new piece of writing.  The rhythm of the school year suits me pretty well, only it would be better if I would work slightly less hard during the semester and accordingly need less time to bounce back after I'm done teaching in December or May.  I think that a year isn't a good year for me if I didn't have at least 90 days of real writing days, where the first and most important thing I did was write quota/produce first draft (and that should be enough to produce a draft of a book or partial drafts of two books), but that a year in which I have 300 writing days is possibly or even probably a year in which I feel bored, grumpy and understimulated; a semester of teaching gives me a hunger for writing time that I can then really take advantage of, and I do not envy those who have undertaken the life of full-time fiction writer.

Update

Have stopped work this afternoon just short of the long final scene, which needs significant revamping (it's not just that I'm moving it from Central Park to Morningside Park, but it's all going to go quite differently this time round).  So: one more editing session with pen and paper, and then I have a messy marked-up pile of manuscript that needs to be transferred to the computer.  I will do one further very thorough going-through, with some bits and pieces of new writing still to be interpolated here and there and hope to send a new version of the novel to my editor before the end of the month.

School starts next week, which is a mixed blessing (really in January I am often in low spirits and ready by now for the distraction of classroom time); I've got one big other work thing due at the end of next week, so I think that I'm going to have to put this aside for some days and organize myself for the beginning of classes before coming back to the novel revision.  However I should be able to make my way to the end first and force myself to undertake the slightly horrible job of typing it all up between now and Tuesday: that's the idea, anyway.

(NB The Young Unicorns stands up pretty well to rereading, and it is interesting for me to see now what I would not have noticed as a child, the fact of its being published in 1968 and written specifically in the shadow of the social transformations of the late 1960s; but A Severed Wasp is dreadful in ways I would not at all have been able to understand when I first read it at age twelve or thirteen, though I still find it grippingly readable in its embarrassing fashion!  Very interesting and appealing, of course, to read two novels set in the neighborhood I've lived in for more than ten years now.)

"20 or 30 legal pads"

Jennifer Egan interviewed at the AV Club (courtesy of Phil N.).
Also, Pankaj Mishra at the LRB on Egan's latest novel.

Far from ideal

Ben Deaton on why it may be unproductive to fantasize about ideal working conditions; via Andrew Gelman, whose thoughts on the matter are also of interest.

"It's all supposed to be embargoed"

An interesting long piece about Michael Moorcock by Hari Kunzru at the Guardian. (Strange to say, I have never actually read a book by Moorcock, though obviously his influence is everywhere; please offer recommendations in the comments if you feel that there is a particular one I can't live without reading!)

A couple of bits I especially liked:

In a recent introduction to The Dancers at the End of Time, which is set in a decadent far future, Moorcock claims to have sported Wildean green carnations as a teenager, not to mention "the first pair of Edwardian flared trousers (made by Burton) as well as the first high-button frock coat to be seen in London since 1910". Elric, much less robust than his creator, who admits his dandyish threads gave him "the bluff domestic air of a Hamburg Zeppelin commander", is part Maldoror, part Yellow Book poseur and part William Burroughs; within a few years of his first appearance in 1961, British culture suddenly seemed to be producing real-life Elrics by the dozen, as Keith Richards, Jimmy Page and others defined an image of the English rock star as an effeminate, velvet-clad lotus-eater. Moorcock was very popular among musicians, and it's tempting to see him as co-creator of the butterfly-on-a-wheel character, which still wanders the halls of English culture in guises ranging from Sebastian Horsley to Russell Brand. I ask him whether he felt at the time that the 60s rockers were living out a role he'd imagined. He's too modest to agree, but tells an anecdote that seems to sum up psychedelic London's openness to fantasy of all kinds. "I'm in the Mountain grill on the Portobello Road, where everyone used to meet to get on the tour buses. I'm sitting there, and this bloke called Geronimo is trying to sell me some dope. He says 'have you heard about the tunnel under Ladbroke Grove?'. He starts to elaborate, about how it's under the Poor Clares nunnery, and you can go into that and come out in an entirely different world. I said to him, 'Geronimo, I think I wrote that'. It didn't seem to bother him much."
...
The literary culture in which Moorcock, Ballard and their peers could make a living from magazine serialisations seems as distant now, in the era of the internet, as the Grub Street of the 18th century to which it bears a more than passing resemblance. I ask Moorcock about his famous 15,000 daily word-rate. How on earth is it possible to produce so much? "It's all planning. I'd have been in bed for three days, during which I've had time to sketch out the story. Then I spring out of bed and I've got a straight nine to five – or nine to six or seven – regime, which frequently includes taking the kids to school, then I just sit down and go through with an hour break for lunch." He makes it sound deceptively simple, though not without its side-effects. "When you write that fast the book really does start to write you, you get high on the book. It's partly lack of sleep, it's partly the sugar – in my case I only had strong black coffee because it kept me going."

Production of quota

I had gotten almost to the end earlier, but then L. came by to pick me up for an excursion and I had to tear myself away from my desk!

c. 1,600 words, for a total of 61,139 words.

The draft is complete!

There are all sorts of things wrong with it: I do think it will need some sort of a conclusion, and also there are various errors of pacing and plotting that arise from this method of writing without really knowing how things go; that will all need some serious fixing later on. I think I will perhaps just read through it once on the computer tomorrow morning and change any very obvious minor mistakes or misphrasings I see, then put it aside to 'rest'. But it is a huge relief to have such a thing as a draft to work with; revision is certainly arduous in its own way, but it is more compatible with life during a teaching semester, I find the effort required to stay on the system of quota production is really needed for other things in the middle of the school year.

I will probably revise in the weeks after spring break and try and get it to my agent sometime in April; that would be good...

Production of quota

c. 1,700 words, for a total of 59,534 words.

I was hoping I would perhaps (this is crazy!) finish this morning; but in fact, though I have written a good chunk, there still remains the crucial important culminating scene to write, the forty minutes' or an hour's worth of events that needs to be described to fill in the gap between where I have got to and the last little bit of the novel which I wrote weeks ago so as to get it down on the page while it was still clear to me. And it did not seem like a good idea to rush it, especially as my concentration is by now seriously flagging!

I am going to just spend the weekend cleaning the draft up a bit in very minor ways, and then let it sit for a month or two; I think I will be able to do a better revision if I let some time pass and gain perspective on it. I may not be able to get back to it until March, I'm not sure. It makes me anxious to let things sit, it is tempting to spend a few extra days and send it out to my agent right away, but I know letting it sit is the right thing to do!

(There is probably going to need to be some sort of a "postscript" section, and that I think I'll wait to write until I have done an initial revision on the whole thing and have a clearer sense of what strictly speaking still needs to be told. On the other hand I really like the way the story ends very abruptly, not unexpectedly but with a death that will in some sense not be investigated or ever fully explained, and I wonder if those bits of story that would otherwise serve as postscript might somehow be folded in to the earlier parts of the story; this might be something I have to test on readers?)

Production of quota

c. 1,000 words, for a total of 57,888 words.

No time to write more this morning, but I might try for a longer than usual session tomorrow - it is coming very close to the end. Then I could take the weekend days to clean things up a bit and put the draft aside for some weeks to 'settle.' I need to get started reading for the essay on Restoration theater and the novel, and I am also wondering whether I shouldn't revise the little book on style before coming back to the novel draft and spending some weeks revising it and getting it ready to send out. That is going to be quite a bit of work, I am suspecting, and it would be tempting to do what I can with the style book and send it back out so as not to have both things on my desk at once...

Production of quota

c. 1,000 words, for a total of 56,803 words.

Production of quota

c. 1,100 words, for a total of 55,830 words. Getting near...

Production of quota

c. 1,500 words, for a total of 54,722 words.

My head is going to explode if I don't finish this draft within the next week or so - I've got too many balls in the air!

Production of quota

c. 1,200 words, for a total of 53,228 words.

+: When I opened Word today, I was offered an autosaved version of the draft from Wednesday that let me reclaim my lost words! They will need to be 'reconciled' later on with the subsequent version; I borrow the metaphor if not the exact word from Robbie Hudson's appealing notion of doing an 'audit' on a novel draft before writing the denouement.

-: Very sleepless night last night - I did sleep in the end from 6-9am or so, which is adequate, but it meant I had to miss morning boot camp, which is troublesome! Think I might whisk myself off to the gym now for a midday session; I have an important 4pm meeting on campus, and various administrative duties to do with my courses for the semester (I am compiling a funny and interesting course reader for the drama lecture that needs to get to the copy shop by the end of the day), but if I wait to exercise until the evening, I risk setting myself up for another night of not being able to fall asleep...

Production of quota

c. 1,000 words, for a total of 51,060 words.

Production of quota

c. 1,500 words, for a total of 50,009 words.

It was hard to get down to business this morning, my mind is on school starting and on the coming season of training and racing. I don't teach till tomorrow, but I need to sort out final details of syllabus, opening lecture, handouts, etc. for Wednesday's class.

I am coming to the climax of the story now, and it is just as well; I have written the little end bit of this section already, which is the scene I had very vividly in mind from very early on, and I am guessing it is probably about 8,000- to 10,000 words that will take me from where I am to that point. If I keep up quota production until the end of next weekend, in other words, I should have a full draft of sorts.

(It is still unclear to me whether the book just ends there or whether there will be some sort of a final section, perhaps written in the form of a newspaper article or some other kind of archival assemblage, that narrates aftermath and explanation. But I think for now I will stop at that abrupt end, unless things come clearer to me about what the 'real' ending would be. I'll let it sit for a week or so and then revise it over the weekend of Feb. 4-6, just a quick down-and-dirty fixing of obvious inconsistencies and repetitions and so forth, so that I can show it to a few early readers.)

Production of quota

c. 1,200 words, for a total of 48,473 words.

I came across it while looking for something else entirely, but I wish I could have seen this lovely exhibit of miniature books at the Clark Library at UCLA in 2008. The picture below is of a book made by the wonderfully named Achille J. St. Onge.