66,600

That's the number currently displayed on my picometer (in the bar to the right). By the time you read this, the number may have gone up, but for now I am reminded that 66,600 was the exact number of words of the first novel I ever wrote. And no, I'm not talking about The Sound of Butterflies.

It was called Birds of Passage, and I wrote it for the MA in Creative Writing at Victoria University (the IIML). It wasn't published; it never will be published, and I am unlikely to mine much material from it for future books.

Don't get me wrong; it wasn't a bad book, but ultimately, it wasn't the kind of book that I wanted to write. My big epiphany came half way through it when I realised that the kind of books I should be writing are not the ones I thought I should be writing, but the kinds of books I like to read. That was when the idea for TSOB was born, but I wanted to finish the job at hand first. I needed to write a novel in nine months for the MA, and knew that TSOB would take me several years.

Loosely, it was about the young kiwi OE experience. How so many people of my generation drift off to the UK to see the world, and have a slight yearning to discover their roots all over those fair isles. In the case of my novel's protagonist, it was Ireland, where her estranged father lived. She travelled around Ireland with him, getting to know him and a few family skeletons. The writing of the novel coincided with a trip I made with my own (non-estranged) father; in fact, it was the upcoming trip that gave me the idea for the book in the first place. But the protagonist was not me, and the father was definitely not my father. I often thought that if I'd had it published, people would possibly buy it to get an insight into my own father. They would be severely disappointed. Either that or they'd be misguidedly excited - the father in my novel turned out to be gay, which was the reason for the estrangement. At the end of course they made their peace, on top of Croagh Patrick in County Mayo, a set piece that I'm still rather proud of and may have to turn into a short story one day. 

If I'm honest, I would say that if I hadn't written that book and someone else had, I would have picked it up in a bookstore and put it straight back down again. Although it's a novel that would have reflected my own experiences, I realised that in the end, that's not what I want to read about, so how could I write those kinds of books? I want to read books that aren't about my experience. And those are the books I would like to write as well. The truth is that my writing is better when I can step outside of myself and use my imagination.

I would like to say that I stuck it nobly in the drawer as soon as I'd finished it, but I did try a few publishers, and received very encouraging rejections. I am so glad that it was never published. The Sound of Butterflies had a much better impact for a first novel than Birds of Passage ever would have. So my thanks go out to those editors that turned it down. You know who you are.

Festival, aspiring writers and the joy of the unmarked page.

Husband has taken son to creche on the way to work today, so have a couple of hours more Friday than I usually do (they left very early - I don't usually get it together this early, hence the huge amount of extra time). I'm fighting the urge to go back to bed, to be honest. Instead I thought I'd take the opportunity to update my sadly neglected blog.

I had a wonderful weekend at the Auckland Writers and Readers Festival. My plane was delayed on Friday night so I missed the annual party held by my publishers (bit sad about that one), and missed most of Richard Dawkins, but arrived just in time to see him present the Royal Society prize for science writing to my talented and beautiful sister-in-law, Rebecca Priestley, for The Awa Book of New Zealand Science. Very pleased and proud I was. It was odd seeing it being presented by a huge man on a screen (Dawkins via satellite).

The rest of the weekend was an intense round of sessions, five or more per day I think, and catching up with all manner of friends, family and colleagues in the gaps between. I won't go into it too much - others have written about it better and more thoroughly than I have (here, here, here and here), but I will say that the highlights for me were Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche and Monica Ali, both warm and engaging and thought-provoking with beautiful readings that left me wanting more (I confess I often nod off at readings and prefer to hear writers talk, but these two were an exception). The success of these sessions was in no small part due to the excellent chairing by Paula Morris, whose energy and intellectual capacity always astounds me. Chairing can be exhausting and challenging, and far harder than it looks, with hours and hours of preparation time (and that doesn't even include all the books you have to read), so I take my hat off to her for chairing three sessions with important writes and doing a wonderful job, as well as appearing as a writer in two sessions. And she even finds time to write books. To digress for a moment, I probably shouldn't point this out but I'm going to: Paula and I wrote our first books together in 2001 during the MA in Creative Writing at the IIML, and since then she has had three novels and one collection of short stories published, with a YA novel due out in August. I am hoping to have my second novel published at the end of the year. I'll leave you to draw your own conclusions.

Another session I enjoyed was the 'Emerging Stars' (no pressure!) with Eleanor Catton, Bridget van der Zijpp and Anna Taylor. It was a great idea on the behalf of the organisers to make this a free session, as it introduced new writers to people who might not otherwise have taken a gamble with their money. Sessions with new writers always attract aspiring writers, so there was the inevitable questions from the audience of "Did you get an agent first or did you just send it into your publisher?" and "Did you sign your international rights over to your publisher?". It always amuses me how aspiring writers (and I still count myself among that group) always want to know things like this, rather than questiosn about how to write well (this has been my experience speaking to first year creative writing students as well). People, it doesn't matter how many agents and editors you sumbit your work to, you've got to put in the hard yards and learn how to write as well as you can first. That should be your priority. And try and enjoy the process of improving your writing for the sake of it.

Now I'm back home and trying to write as much as I can. I have about 10,000 words to go for a complete draft of the new novel and have possibly settled on a title. Because of the way I work, although it will be a complete draft, it won't be a first draft as such. I tend to work things out as I go along, and the first half of the book is pretty polished as I wrote and rewrote until I got the voice right. Once the voice comes, it can seemingly just write itself. This novel has a contemporary story and an historical story. Unlike with The Sound of Butterflies, which I wrote from start to finish in the way it is read (alternating between two different time periods), I have completed the historical section and am now tackling the end (and the middle and all the bits in between) of the (much more complex) contemporary section. To get myself in the right frame of mind, I started at the beginning, picking up the printouts I have been carrying around with me for nine months of what I have written so far and went through and incorporated all the notes that I have scribbled over those pages during the that time. I can't tell you how satisfying I found it to get to the end of one chapter and reprint it, all clean and beautiful, knowing it was as good as I can get it at this point. I have five more of these to go, and then it's the home stretch, pulling all those loose threads together and writing those final chapters. I am on track, so far, and have scheduled panic and anxiety for six weeks time. Before that, it is not allowed.

Titles are hard.

I have not been blogging lately. You may have noticed. Instead, I have been deep inside deadline-land, trying to finish the new novel by August 1. Anyone following my picometer (to the right - just a bit of fun really) will see that although the word count is inching up, the percentage of novel completed is not. That is because for every 3000 words I write, I realise that the novel in fact needs to be 3000 longer than what I originally thought. It like one of those sci-fi or horror movies where the heroine is walking down a corridor and the corridor just keeps expanding.

One thing I have been thinking about, of necessity, is the title for the novel. I thought I had it all sorted, with two title options, both of which I liked, but one I liked slightly less due to its construction being The (something) of (something). One of my friends from my very scientific Facebook poll suggested that "Either's a good title [The Sound of Butterflies and the Something of Something]; together they look like an attempted branding exercise." Well, that was what I had been afraid of all along, despite this title's absolutely perfect capturing of theme and motif.

The other title, secretly my favourite, has had a mixed reaction. It seems it is too similar to a famous book written in the 1960s - do I really want people to think of that book? Well, actualy, it wouldn't hurt if they did, but it may set up expectations about the plot and deliver too neatly to those expectations. Need a bit more mystery in there. My version of the title has also been done before, and quite recently, albeit for a trashy thriller a million miles from the literary masterpiece I am constructing. But, like, it's been a bestseller, so a lot of people have at least heard of it. The final nail in the coffin is that some people think it's just plain boring - but it makes so much sense when the book is read, and brings the two threads of the story together in perfect harmony. Sigh.

So it's back to the drawing board. Everything I come up with just doesn't make me fall in love. It's a stock phrase, or it's been done before, or it looks good on paper but when you say it out loud it is clumsy. And the worst thing is that it's distracting me from the important task at hand - writing the book. I'm hoping that as I type the last word the perfect title will just slide into my head. Unfortunately I need it before then.

Not writing.

It hasn't been the best week or so for writing. Son was sick at the beginning of last week, which meant we had to put off our planned trip to Dunedin until he was better. Which luckily didn't take too long - we drove down on Wednesday and back on Friday night. I had a dance workshop on Saturday which might have been where I picked up the illness that struck me down on Sunday night and has only started to come right this morning after lots of sleeping and generally lying around feeling sorry for myself.

So not much writing, but I plan to make amends in spectacular fashion this afternoon. Had a great time in Dunedin. I hadn't been there for nine years and as soon as I drove into town I remembered how much I love it. Something about the Gothic quality of light and the buildings and the way its history has been preserved in the inner city. I spent a lot of time in Dunedin in my youth, when I played in bands, regularly touring there and even living there for a short time when I played in the 3Ds. Then, I thought it was a magical place, full of ancient wisdom, and certainly there was something there that produced all that great music.

I even liked visiting in the middle of winter, staying with people who usually had nothing more than a two-bar heater to huddle around for warmth. We had many a party with blankets over our knees and we wore all our clothes to bed. It was just what we did. I think people must be softer these days with their fancy heating and wanting to walk around their houses without their coats and hats on.

The first time I drove out to the Otago Peninsula I loved looking at all the drystone walls - they seemed a direct connection to the Scotland the Dunedin settlers had left behind. But this time I didn't see any - perhaps they have finally fallen down and been replaced by wire fences; or perhaps we didn't explore enough.

We were very kindly accommodated by fellow author and blogger Vanda Symon. She and her family made us feel wonderfully welcome and relaxed, and, as she mentions on Overkill, we even had a bloggy lunch, with Tania Roxborough and Paradoxical Cat. So, while I wasn't writing, at least my brain was being stimulated. I am slightly in awe (and a little suspicious - kidding Tania!) of Tania, who wrote her latest novel, which is 120,000 words long, in approximately two months.

The highlight of the trip for me was the Otago Museum. We only visited two exhibits - the butterfly house (which I wish had been there when I was researching The Sound of Butterflies) and the Animal Attic. The latter is a replica of the original museum with its wondrous collection of 19th century taxidermy and natural curiosities, which was wonderful for research for my current novel.

 

We decided to take the scenic route back to Christchurch and got lost not once but twice, and since it was 5pm when we left, we were driving around the hills when it was dark, so we didn't even have the benefit of any scene from our scenic detour in the end.

The upside of being sick was that I caught up on some long overdue reading and in three days read Mary McCallum's The Blue and Sarah Laing's Dead People's Music, both of which I highly recommend. No time now to go into great detail - a hungry novel awaits.

The hare and the tortoise.

I was having a conversation with a novelist friend of mine the other day who mentioned that she is unhappy with how her novel has turned out despite numerous rewrites. She (and her publisher) have given herself three months to give it a final go to get it right. I also have a deadline which is a little over three months away, and it seems that our novels will be hitting the public at about the same time ("Let's feud!" she said).

Feuding aside, it got me thinking about just how different each writer's process is but how we all eventually get there in the end. This novelist and I both started our novels at around the same time. In fact I started a novel that I have since abandoned. Everything seemed to be going so well for her with it and I confess I felt a little jealous. She has always been so disciplined and always seemed to enjoy the first draft process. She was very much of the "just write 1000 words a day and you have a draft in three months" school, whereas I have always aimed for 1000 words a day and failed miserably.

It doesn't matter how many words I write, it seems it takes as long as it takes and I can either work it out on the page and write copious amounts of words, or I can write fewer words and work it out in my head. At the moment I have two and a half days to write, plus another couple of hours on Wednesday afternoons when the toddler is at my mother's house and I sneak off to her local library.

(Aside: sometimes those two hours are as, if not more, productive than the full days I have. I usually just put my head down and write in a stream of consciousness fever, then the next day go back and either find 700 words of rubbish or 700 gems.)

I can't help but wonder whether, if I had more time to write, the book would get written quicker. I suspect not. I think it's just going to take as long as it takes for the words to ripen and fall onto the page - if I were to force them out at 1000 words per day, seven days per week, I would inevitably end up throwing many of those words away. This way, it's like a steady drip, and by a designated date (hopefully within my deadline), the bucket of the novel will be full. To carry on the metaphor, if I were to pour great gushes into the bucket, I would inevitably end up spilling half of it on the floor.

What can I say? I am the tortoise, at first jealous of the hare's lightning pace and quick mind, but ultimately I think we will get there at the same time.

The joys of self-employment.

One of the things that I have noticed about self-employment is that, while I get to work my own hours, it also means that public holidays often don't mean a thing except perhaps a mild inconvenience. Case in point: my son's creche is closed today through Tuesday. Friday and Tuesday are my two full writing days in the week, with one half day on Thursday. I know I should just relax and use the time to spend with my family, but I have a deadline and a momentum to keep up.

Luckily for me, husband has taken son away for a few hours. Unluckily for me, who finds it impossible to work at home because of the mountains of housework beckoning, the libraries are all shut today. Luckily, I can always work in a cafe. Unluckily, they are very busy and everything costs 15% more due to the public holiday surcharge. (Incidentally, when I worked in hospitality, before the Employment Contracts Act, we used to get paid extra on weekends and public holidays, but the restaurants and cafes sucked up the extra. Why? Because take a look around: businesses boom on those days. They easily used to make enough extra money to cover the extra wages. I resent places charging me for them to pay their staff fairly when they are pulling in extra anyway.)

For some reason Christchurch cafes seem to more expensive than elsewhere. We long ago stopped going out for weekend brunch when it ended up costing us $50+ for a modest breakfast for two and a fluffy/muffin combo for toddler - add 15% on top of that and there goes our week's food budget. At first I thought it was just the state of everything, food costing more etc, but a return to Wellington proved it was otherwise. It's just Christchurch. Who knows why?

And of course when you are at home with children, it's hard work whether it's a normal day or a holiday. Same with when you're a writer with a deadline.

However, I shall be indulging in more than the usual amount of chocolate and taking the weekend off work.

Полет бабочек

The Sound of Butterflies for those of you who can read Russian... and I now know that my name in Russian is Рейчел Кинг. 

Second Novel Syndrome.

This term has been bandied about a bit lately thanks to the announcement that Audrey Niffenegger has received a whopping advance for her second novel. Expectations are running high for the novel, as are expectations that the knives will be out once it hits the stores.

This story in the Times mentions some high flying debut novelists whose second attempts have failed to live up to their first: Charles Frazier and Zadie Smith (who more than made up for it with the superb On Beauty in my opinion) for example. Included in the list is Donna Tartt's The Little Friend, which I would strongly argue does not deserve to be on a list of failures. Sure, she had the syndrome bad probably, which is why it took her so long to write (ten years between outings) but I thought it was very good book - a very different book, but a good one nonetheless.

Of course all of this has come to my attention because I am working on my own second novel after a reasonably well received first novel. I am constantly being asked by people if I feel under pressure to live up to my first. My answer is that of course I do, but it's not other people's expectations that I feel acutely, but my own. I just want to write a better book. I am writing a better book (she says, hoping that statement won't come back to bite her on the behind!). It's been 7 years since I started The Sound of Butterflies - I should be a better writer by now. So, yes intense pressure, thanks very much, but I don't think it is to do with Second Novel Syndrome. I hope I never rest on my laurels and feel released from that kind of pressure, because that's when I have stopped trying to improve.

All a writer can do when faced with something like SNS is to ignore it and sit down and write the best book he or she can write. And that goes for third, fourth and fifth novels. 

Libraries as offices, and some technology advice.

I arrived at the library today to find a talk being given by Basia Bonkowski, author of the memoir Shimmer. I'll just sit down and listen for a bit, I thought. A question came from the cosy audience: what was your writing schedule like for the book (a topic which seems to hold endless fascination for audiences the world over - aspiring writers themselves perhaps, looking for the secret?)? Well, said Ms Bonkowski, I had two small children and after I dropped them off at school at 9am, I turned down everything else so I could spend four hours writing. Then at 1pm I stopped to do the errands I needed to do before picking the kids up again.

Here I was, in the library, having just dropped my son off at creche with 4 hours to write, and what was I doing? Not writing. So, feeling guilty, I slunk away and began my working day.

The Christchurch libraries have become my new office. I have talked before about how I can't work at home. Working in the library is great. They have wireless internet for when a little procrastination is in order, and no other distractions. I find the general hum and bookishness of the place very conducive to working on a book. Yesterday I went to the Sumner library, which is near my mother's house, where I stole two hours. It is amazing how I seem to be able to write just as much in two hours as I can when I have a whole day. I think this is because I have to only focus on one thing - getting some words out - whereas on my full days I tend to start slowly (because I have all day, right?) and spend a lot more time reading books and websites for research and thinking about the overall novel instead of just the next 500 words.

As I was typing away at the Sumner library, my brand new computer froze on me. I rebooted it, hoping that it would autorecover the file I had been working on. It didn't. Not only that, but when I opened my memory stick, all the files, despite still being there, with names and 'last modified' dates on them, were completely blank. 0 kb used. Blank.

Luckily I have been almost vigilant about backing up this novel. The memory stick contained all the files that I had held on my work computer at the university, which I had already backed up onto another memory stick (thank God). But I lost what I had written that day and the day before, which admittedly wasn't very much.

I learned a valuable lesson. Apparently, if you open a file in a memory stick you should copy it over to your hard drive and then start working on it. Otherwise it can behave in all sorts of strange ways, and it doesn't automatically autosave like a hard drive file would do.

Not the most inspired post today but I hope that is useful to someone. The reason I'm letting myself add to my blog? I wrote my afternoon's minimum quota in half an hour today. Must have been thanks to a kick up the posterior by one Basia Bonkowski. Think I'll go back and write some more. 

Deadlines. And a few ramblings about technique.

I have a self-imposed deadline of August to finish my new novel. That gives me five months to finish the first draft (25% to go) and whip it into shape. It's a very real deadline. I have something else on from the end of August that will stop me writing for quite some time and I just won't allow myself to not finish it by then.

But it is putting the pressure on. When I think about five months, it seems like a long time, but I know how fast that can travel. But then again, if I look at it practically, it took me only four months from finishing the first draft of The Sound of Butterflies to submitting it and having it accepted by an agent in the UK and a publisher in New Zealand. My writing is much more confident and stream-lined now, so the new draft is a) shorter and b)more polished than TSOB was at this stage.

I talked a long time ago about my decision to try out the shitty first draft technique on this novel, but I abandoned that along the way. You see, I need to feel that I am in control in order to move forward, and that meant going back over the early chapters until the voice was right and until they pointed me in the right direction of where to go next. I also need to feel in love with my book to be excited enough to keep going, and a shitty draft isn't going to generate that love. So even though I'm calling it my 'first draft', my chapter one has gone through six drafts, my chapter two four drafts etc.

I gave a small talk at the Hagley Writers' Institute, where I will be supervising a few students this year. I read from my new novel, which felt really good. Reading it out loud enabled me to hear it with fresh ears and I liked what I heard (you can probably tell I'm going through a bit of a romantic phase with my novel - in all likelihood we will be fighting and/or not speaking to each other in a couple of weeks). It also reminded me how valuable reading your work aloud to yourself is. I did a practice run the day before for timing, and it helped me make a few adjustments to sentences that didn't flow, to trim them a bit and to work on the cadence of the language, which is very important to me: I do not believe in just delivering information in the most economical number of words; they have to sound right. I read the entire manuscript of The Sound of Butterflies aloud to myself for the very final draft. It took me about a week, from memory. A daunting but very valuable exercise, which I recommend to anyone on the verge of finishing their novels. It helps you pick up all sorts of gremlins.

But back to Hagley - one of the students asked the assembled supervisors (an illustrious group: Charlotte Randall, Frankie McMillan, whose reading of a short story had me enthralled, and Jeffrey Paparoa Holman) about how much they plan their work before writing. Charlotte Randall says she doesn't plan hers at all, she just starts writing, although she often writes the last page first so she has something to work towards. Frankie said she writes a draft from start to finish, but she writes short stories, which is a bit different to writing a novel. I gave contradictory answers really. I plan bits. Then I unplan. One novel I nearly wrote I think I planned too much and it froze me. I realised that the students were listening eagerly to see how much planning they should do, but in the end I had to confess that it works differently for everyone and the only way to find out what works for you is to write a novel. I learned more about writing a novel by actually writing one than I could have from any number of classes or how-to books and blogs. That first novel was never published, but it didn't need to be - it served its purpose, which was to teach me how to write a novel.

I spent the weekend in Welllington where I had an absolute ball, catching up with good friends, attending one of the best weddings I've ever been to (and probably ever will) and meeting with my writing group. It was perfect really. My writing group gave me wonderful advice and encouragement and I wished I could explain to them what I was trying to achieve without spoiling all the surprises in the book. At the moment, if it works, it will be the kind of book that you need to read all the way to the end to see how everything that has come before falls into place. If it works.

So this deadline has put a fire under me, and as a result I think my blog is going to suffer a bit. But then I hope I can be back with posts about the process of getting one's second book published, which I hope will be useful to some.

Onwards.