Posted on

Buckfast or Books?

I’ve sadly under-nourished this blog over the past few weeks for a couple of good reasons and one that’s, unfortunately, not so satisfying.

The first good reason is that I’m trying to get the novel manuscript revised after Emma Sweeney’s feedback (the two solid weeks mentioned in previous posts) and I’ve decided to ask her to look over the first three chapters of the novel in more detail as these are what it will initially be assessed on by agents.

Incidentally I was invited by Emma on Thursday to the Literary Club at New York University in London, where she teaches, and I met the novelist Edward Hogan who was giving a reading. I had a short chat with him and he’s really nice chap. Several people have recommended his novels Blackmoor and The Hunger Trace and the reading he gave us from the latter was very compelling.

The second reason for lack of blog updates is fitting in lots of commitments in general life. As well as the evening at NYU in London, we had a rare evening workshop with the ex-City stalwarts on Tuesday and there have been some gripping, if disappointing, Premier League matches that haven’t escaped my attention.

But Saturday was something of a ceremonial milestone as I went to up to Birmingham,

Graduation at Birmingham
All Robed Up

where I spent three years as an undergraduate, for my Open University MSc degree ceremony at the Symphony Hall.

(As a strange co-incidence, the redeveloped canals of city-centre Birmingham — one of which I’m posing next to — play a part in my MA course-mate Kerry’s novel-in-progress.)

It’s been over a year since I finished the MSc (see this post about when I got the hard copies back) and I could have gone to earlier graduation ceremonies but I wanted one at a weekend and I thought it quite appropriate to return to the scene of my undergraduate dissolution. The Birmingham Symphony Hall was an impressive venue — preferable imho to the OU’s London location for graduation — the Barbican (where I was presented with my MBA from Kingston University) — described as a ‘concrete bunker’ by someone I work with who had a choice of Barbican or Brighton Pavilion for his OU graduation.

I’m such an OU advocate that I went back to look at the website to see if there were any courses I could do that might advance some of the interests I’ve picked up in the long process of researching this novel — art being an obvious choice but also architecture and psychology.

I had a shock when I saw the cost of a 60 point humanities course had shot up to £2,500. I had a look at the prices for the Creative Writing and Advanced Creative Writing courses — and both were also the same price. When I first enrolled for Creative Writing back in 2007 I’m sure the cost was more like £600.

Perhaps the government has cut the OU’s funding — but the OU may also feel it can justify charging more because 360 points earns a student a bachelor’s degree — so £15,000 at current prices which is far less than the £27,000 or so students will have to pay at most conventional universities.

This means anyone taking the same creative writing courses as those I did will need to shell out £5k nowadays — which, I suppose, makes me appreciate more the amount and quality of creative writing teaching that I’ve been taking almost continuously for the last five years — and this in turn makes me think that I need to push myself to try and get a return on all this investment (hence less time spent blogging recently and more writing the novel). And perhaps mercifully for my leisure time the OU’s new fees deter me from casually signing up to a new Arts course on the basis that it looks interesting.

It’s very easy for an aspiring writer to spend a lot of money in the quest to become published and I wonder if more money is now made by people charging for courses, manuscript appraisals, consultancy, conferences and so on than is made by writers in the act of writing itself (if you take the likes of J.K.Rowling out of the calculation). It seems that plenty of excellent published writers supplement their scandalously meagre income from writing in this way.

However, this might not be such an odd model for the future — it’s how activities like sport, art or cookery are organised — with a few star professionals whom the masses aspire to emulate. Even though they know they’ll never be Wayne Rooney or Damien Hirst or Jamie Oliver, millions are happy to practice in their own leisure time and pay others for tuition. If writing hasn’t already adopted this model it might be because of the high fixed costs of publishing — but now with cheap access to e-publishing and print on demand — then there are fewer barriers to much wider, paying participation as with sport.

But back to the graduation ceremony. One thing that struck me was the demographic composition of my fellow graduates. Probably two thirds of those being ceremonially conferred with a degree were women — and women of all ages. The men were skewed much more towards the older age group — I was told that I was one of the few who didn’t have grey hair (not enough to notice on a stage anyway). This might not have been surprising for postgraduates but the undergraduates outnumbered us by about 8 to 1.

This ties in with evidence, such as that cited in The Economist’s Megachange book that I was given to read, that women already outnumber men overall in the tertiary education sector. If, as we’re told by forecasters like The Economist, that the future of work will depend much more on the sort of intelligence and innovation that comes from a higher level of education then the larger proportion of women than men! who seem to put in the sort of time commitment and motivation that an OU degree requires, ought to manifest some profound changes in the workplace.

I travelled up to Birmingham on the train and, as if to re-inforce the point, there was a large party of Scottish twenty-something men in my carriage. At 9am they were swilling Rab C Nesbitt’s favourite tipple — Buckfast — straight from the bottle and washing it down with cans of Red Stripe. Like most people I guess I have a fairly hypocritical attitude to public drinking if it’s not me that’s doing it — if I’m sober and I smell beer on someone’s breath on the tube I think ‘alky’ — even though I must often be that beery-breathed person myself.  So I was pretty appalled by this bunch even though they were (at that time in the morning) fairly good natured. Presumably they were on some weekend bender of which I was glad to have only to witnessed the beginning.

Nevertheless, while extreme, this seemed to sum up the contrast between feckless under-40 males and their more diligent and industrious female counterparts. At the risk of making sweeping gender stereotyping generalisations, the fact that, on average, men manage to hold their own in the workplace against better qualified women seems to me to be another instance of the ‘bias towards bullshit’ in British corporate culture.

This prejudice leaped out of one of Lord Sugar’s comments in the latest Apprentice — where he reasoned that Azhar ought to be fired partly because his sensible points and good ideas were ignored by other the more loud-mouthed and egotistical contestants — and that telling idiots who are too self-absorbed to listen that they are wrong is somehow ‘too negative’.

This is a theme, possibly unintentionally, of my novel — with two contrasting but highly educated and highly motivated female characters. Both Kim and Emma have Master’s degrees and are ascending to the top of their professions (albeit in ways that might not seem obvious at the time). James also has an MBA but he’s disaffected and marginalised by working life and the novel starts with him wanting to get out but drifting rather than than being driven to achieve his ambitions.

The MSc in Software Development is something of a clue that my ‘day job’ is something to do with IT, which is thought of as a fairly male-dominated industry. However, I tend to have always worked quite closely with women. My first job was as a graduate trainee at British Airways and I had a female on-the-job tutor and I’ve worked very closely with many women — for a long time in my last job I was the only male in a team of three who travelled abroad a lot together (mainly to Germany — hence the background to the novel) and I ended up for a time sitting next to the two PAs who worked for a FTSE 100 company’s UK IT director — which provided quite a few fascinating insights. (No surprise there’s also a PA in the novel.)

I’ve consequently found it odd to be working recently (the third reason for under-nourishing the blog is having to spend lots of time commuting for this job) in a team of people who are 100% male — the office environment and projects I mostly work on are fortunately quite mixed but the team meetings have been quite strange affairs. Today there was a discussion in blokily knowledgeable detail about how the missiles planned to be stationed in London for the Olympics would be used to shoot down any errant airliners. It’s as if it’s unsaid but everyone realises there’s something indefinable that’s missing –I’m sure there’s a similar sort of dynamic in all-women teams too in professions where women are dominant (apparently publishing is meant to be one).

Ironically, if someone said ‘what we need on this team is a few women’ then it would get exactly the sort of ribald, guffawing, nudge-nudge response that would prove the point. And I suppose a lot of the novel is about this subject too — the interactions between working men and women provide much of the novel’s momentum.

[NB. Post has been cleaned up after up the mess of trying to edit a blog on an iPad using Safari on a 3G connection on a train.]

Posted on

Reviewing the Literature

There are two reasons why the blog has been a little quieter than usual recently. One is that an element of my ‘other life’ intruded – hopefully the side that will continue to pay the bills in future.  I had to submit an assignment for my Open University MSc in Software Development. I’d set aside a fortnight or so to concentrate on this but I ended also producing going on for 7,000 words of ‘The Angel’, which diluted my efforts somewhat.

I ended up sitting at the laptop in the end from 6am one day until 2am the next morning to try and complete the assignment before the deadline.  The way this OU course works is to build up the final dissertation of about 15,000 words in incremental assignments so you start off with a proposal and then add the literature review and the draft research before submitting the whole thing at the end all polished up and with a conclusion.

What I had to complete was the literature review – which isn’t an enjoyable account of a few choice novels read recently but an attempt to track down academic literature relevant to your subject and assess its contribution to the body of knowledge. My topic is Enterprise Architecture, which is basically how one organises the many IT systems within an organisation to work effectively rather than, as usually happens in practice, allowing IT to re-inforce the warring sectarianism and factionalism within any large organisation.  The term ‘architecture’ has been appropriated by the IT industry to the annoyance of some of the building variety but the analogy transfers quite well. (And I believe that the same sort of skills used in this line of IT work transfer well into novel writing — being able to see the underlying structure of plot, pace, character and so on which lie beneath the surface detail and complexity — I think some of the feedback I gave in the City course owed something to these skills.)

In this area, where IT interacts deals with the corporate strategy of an organisation, it’s quite difficult to find any contemporary academic literature in the first place. This is probably because, despite IT all being based on the work of very clever people in universities, many contemporary practitioners are militantly anti-academic – wanting to prove) how macho, hands-on and problem solving they can be to ‘the business’ (a meaningless and self-loathing term that is used to elevates the status of anyone in a company NOT in IT the IT department as doing the real work).

In ‘The Angel’ James is motivated to leave his City job by this sort of philistinism. Despite his outward gaucheness  and blokey good nature, he’s actually a very bright chap – he has some Masters degree in Finance – his (ex-)job is in the application of clever computer systems which few people (including Will, his boss) can understand. He wants to learn – except now about art and cookery – and he’s pretty appalled by the crass anti-intellectualism of those around him.

So I’ve been finding recent academic papers in my area from places as diverse as Venezuela and Taiwan and I’m a little guilty of not really reading them properly – just finding a quotation which illustrates a point I’ve wanted to make. Doing the novel writing course has made me aware of the main criticism I’m likely to get from my supervisor for what I submitted – the narrative coherence could be improved.

There are a reasonable amount of references and it’s all pretty much on-topic but there’s probably far more work require to relate these to my own argument and research question (and the vagueness of exactly what it is what I’m meant to be analysing in my own research is another bigger flaw).

Even so, this is exactly why the OU structures these dissertations as it does — so when you make a cock-up of the first attempt you have plenty of time to improve it before the eventual submission deadline. Hopefully!

It’s an interesting time management challenge to juggle a serious MSc project and trying to complete the novel started on the City course — a distillation of the question about what I need to do to make a living against what I think I’d like to do.  However, I read a few writing magazines on holiday which gave some information about average published novelists’ earnings suggests that no matter how successful the writing goes, the day-job is likely to be needed for a while yet.

Posted on

Looking for Inspiration

I wrote quite a bit in a short time up until the last Saturday workshop — around 7,000 words of the beginning of ‘The Angel — two sizeable chapters or perhaps three or four shorter ones. I tend to like shorter chapters myself when I’m reading a book — it leads to a feeling of having achieved more as a reader. However, the style I’ve written in tends to change point of view between James and Kim (in fact for the first chapter more than POV — the whole scene changes as they are apart). That might make for chapters that are too bitty or too obviously in parallel. No need to worry so much about that at the moment, though.

I also wrote about 4,000 words for Swan Supping — mainly a walk and the Beer Diet attached to a previous post — and submitted a 3,500 word assignment for my MSc. (However, there is a serial called ‘The Gravediggers’ Arms’ in Swan Supping, now in its fourth part, by a Charlie Mackle that concerns someone called James taking over a pub — a bit of a protoype for ‘The Angel’.) This probably came off worst in terms of quality. I’ve had it marked and got 60%, which is ok, but based on initial comments from my supervisor I’d hoped to bullshit a bit more effectively but she’d found me out in places and I realise I’ll need to put more time into the next one, which actually counts towards the course marks. Even so, I suppose I’ve taken the first steps to doing it, which is probably the biggest obstacle in these sort of things.

Given that about 3,000 words of The Angel’s extracts were written a week or two before then that’s about 11,000 words done in the space of just over a week. Since then I’ve found it quite difficult to get myself going again. I note from Bren Gosling’s latest blog post (that I note enviously was written from Sicily) that he’s also finding it difficult to start up again after the culmination of last term. In an effort to re-invigorate myself I’ve gone back and looked over the comments that coursemates made on the scripts of the extracts I read for my third reading, back at the end of February. That was two scenes — one of James and Emma looking over a spreadsheet about finances and one the fire scene with James and Kim. The comments were, without exception, really supportive and generous. Some queried a few practical things (volume of fire alarm, is dopamine a hormone? and so on) and made some constructive suggestions. A few comments recurred among several readers — ‘dialogue is always one of your strengths’, ‘the characters’ voices seem real’, ‘believe in the finance speak’, ‘fast-moving’, ‘a page turner’, ‘want to find out what happens next’, ‘deft and sly humour’ and there was also one comment that praised the prose, which I particularly liked as the writing wasn’t particularly showy in those sections. Most comments said this was the best section yet and how it was hitting its stride — which makes it all quite infuriating to find it quite difficult to make myself sit there and grind out more of it unless I have some deadline looming.

I’ve rewritten the ends of the two threads from James and Kim’s POV inside the tub carriage where he turns up on the morning he’s been fired to pay £500 for a painting that she tried to sell for £1,000 the night before at a viewing. This was the end of the chapter I submitted to Alison as my supposed 4,000 novel opening (it’s more likely to be the end of chapter one and start of chapter two). The rewritten part is just practical scene-setting for the 1,000 or so words I’ve managed since then. These, in themselves, tend to set up the rest of the day, which will be the long-anticipated bender (subject to much procrastination in writing terms). He’ll find out she’s in serious debt and she’ll reveal she makes ends meet by working some shifts in a pub (hardly on international art collector circuit money). I’ll also try to describe how Kim looks. It’s important that she’s not too good-looking but she has to have the capability of developing into someone he does find very attractive in the end (Jane Eyre similarities again). She’s also got to look fairly good from a distance in a soft-focus sort of way (I have some plot ideas about this) so he’ll get close up to her and find a few off-putting things like imperfect complexion, unhealthy pallor, bony face exaggerated by piercings and so on — all stuff that can gradually melt away.  

The bender scene will also pack in quite a lot of character exposition. I’m hoping I can get away with this by moving fast from location to location but I do have concerns that I’ll have perhaps an opening 15,000 words or so that almost entirely concentrates on the two principal characters over a period of about 30 hours in London. I raised this at my tutorial with Alison a week last Saturday and she seemed to think it was ok. I’ll end up following this introduction with an extended time period during which the two characters team up and build up their business, which will be quite a contrast. However, there will be quite a nice symmetry in that I plan the ending to be in London with a similar fast pace, though I may have to insert extra plot elements to bring it up to anything like 15,000 words.

Speaking of Alison’s tutorial, I specifically asked in advance about some concerns that I had and she replied in pencil on a printout of the e-mail in amusingly laconic fashion. ‘Is the scene with James fast-moving enough? ‘ [YES] ‘Are the ones with Kim on her own too slow?’ [OK — WITH EDITING — NB. I’m personally still a little concerned about these being static especially when I continue the action later in Village Underground.] ‘I’ve intercut the two threads in this extract and wonder whether this is a valid approach.’ [YES] ‘I’m also interested in what you make of the location for Kim — it’s a bit unusual but is it clear?’ [YES — GREAT]. And the real paranoid ‘is it any good question: ‘Overall, would this set up a story that readers would be interested in?’ [YES]. So I take all that as not a bad endorsement and really a call for myself to bloody get on with it.

Posted on

Sunlight at the End of the Tunnel?

Just as the weather has started to turn after the greyest, most miserable winter, I’ve been struck down by a horribly persistent virus that I thought a week ago was a cold but now I’m wondering if it might be some sort of flu. I’ve managed to drag myself into City University three times in eight days – two Wednesdays and a Saturday for my reading — but was certainly unfit for work duty between Friday and yesterday (Wednesday).

What’s most depressing is that the virus seems to be tapping my energy to write stuff. I did the piece of Kim’s hometown when I was coming down with it but have only done another 500 words since then. It’s been well over 10 days since I was able to get out for a run — and the weather for it is fantastic now compared with a week or two ago. I’m hoping I can get out and run tomorrow — I don’t always use the time to think about writing but sometimes it gives me a good opportunity to think these through. It also generates the various endorphins and dopamines (or whatever) that make me feel invigorated to get stuck in to things. (Incidentally I had James do a bit of internal monologue about hormones or other body produced chemicals involved in physical attraction. When I read this out on Saturday at City it caused a bit of debate. I didn’t have chance to say that I deliberately wrote it to show his confusion — not sure if that actually worked — but I originally started off from the premise that he’d be fantasising about touching Emma in a way that would set  off her oxytocin level — the human-bonding hormone or whatever it is.)

To try and impress the joys of spring, here’s a photo of the grass verge outside our house. I planted it a few years ago with crocuses and have added snowdrops in the green over the last couple of years. It looks wonderful when the sun is out on days like these. Soon the snowdrops will go over but hopefully they’ll come back stronger next year. (I’ve ordered another 100 to add to them.) This is quite an unselfish flower display as we can’t see it from the house — the main benefit is to people walking by — some of whom repay the compliment by letting their dogs crap on the grass.

Spring 2010 -- At Last
Spring 2010 -- At Last

This morning I had a tutorial with my Open University MSc. dissertation supervisor — Dr Lucia Rapanotti — who I discovered, is a real Italian. It was the first time I’d used Skype and, quite bizarrely, when I put the webcam on it inherited the settings that had been last used by my children — which included the image manipulation software that doctors the image in supposed funny ways. I couldn’t find a way to turn it off so throughout my tutorial, my supervisor saw my image with huge cartoon horse ears attached to my head! Talk about making a good first impression.

The MSc. work is hopefully part of a plan that will allow me to develop a specialism in an area of IT (IT Governance and Enterprise Architecture) which could lead to some opportunities to write and do consultancy. If I’m successful then this would fit reasonably well with doing creative writing as well — write the technical stuff to pay the bills and try and hammer out as much creative stuff as I can until the point where I might be able to ditch the more boring stuff. Still, I’ve not proved I can make any money from either yet so I need to do a lot of work to get to a point where I might. That’s why it’s pretty frustrating to be laid up ill — so much to read and write and the clock’s ticking.