Sarah Eve Kelly

This teaser comes from my completed novel, The Fidelity Trial. Here we find Anne Boleyn on the fourth day of her imprisonment in the Tower of London, trying to make some pleasant conversation with her captors and figure a few things out. Comments and lambasts &c. Enjoy!

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5^th May 1536. Lieutenant’s Lodgings, The Tower.

‘They have all confessed, you know,’ Lady Shelton said.

Anne looked up from her writing desk. ‘This paper is very difficult to write on,’ she replied. ‘Surely there is no harm in sending me my own paper. Please ask Cromwell if he would be so kind.’ Here she paused. ‘Confessed - to what?’

She still had not been told the charges. ‘The musician Smeaton, Henry Norris, Francis Weston -’

‘Weston!’ Anne cried. ‘Is he here now as well?’

‘All the guilty parties are being gathered,’ Shelton said.

‘Being gathered,’ Anne muttered. ‘So what? They are guilty of what?’

‘Adultery with you, madam.’

‘A - ‘ Anne could not complete the word as laughter burst out of her. She leaned back in her chair and howled with it, losing her breath and gasping it in again, great bursts that began low and teetered higher and higher until she was almost frightened by the sound of it - two women now, she knew not which, were at either side of her, holding her, shouting at her to be calm, and she was reminded of her miscarriage, when her legs were held open so her child could be taken from her.

When the laughter subsided she shrugged both shoulders violently to get the women away from her, and pressed her forehead into her slim hands. ‘He’s gone mad,’ she said at length.

‘Who, madam?’ Shelton asked.

‘Who?’ Anne repeated, and felt a bubble of mirth rise in her again. ‘Who knows? Cromwell! The King! They’ve all gone mad.’ She spied Lady Kingston, scribbling in a corner. ‘What are you writing, Lady Kingston?’ she called. ‘Tell them I don’t think my loving husband is truly mad. Whoever will get that letter.’ She rattled into silence. ‘He’s doing this to test me,’ she said after a moment. ‘Henry’s doing this to test me. He isn’t mad at all.’

Lady Kingston kept writing.

Anne looked up at Shelton, whose face was blank and white. ‘What of your nephew, aunt?’

‘Madam?’

‘To what has your nephew George Viscount Rochford - to what has he confessed?’

‘Why, madam -’

‘The others. Cromwell says it was adultery, does he? Well, what of my brother? He can’t possibly - ‘ she paused. Shelton moved into the next room. ‘He cannot - it can’t be true.’ Anne’s eyes trailed Shelton through the door into the bedchamber. ‘Aunt!’ she called. ‘Do they mean to make the world believe that I have fornicated with my brother?’ She heard the rasp of Lady Kingston’s quill. ‘Oh, leave off, won’t you,’ she hissed.

‘They say that Mark Smeaton is being kept in irons,’ Lady Kingston said by way of reply.

‘Of course he is,’ Anne said, distracted. ‘He isn’t a gentleman, he’s not entitled - oh, my God, George!’

Shelton did not return.

‘George,’ Anne murmured again, and then stood and strode over to Lady Kingston, who scrambled to get her papers out of Anne’s reach. ‘Write whatever you like,’ Anne said with a brittle smile, standing over her. ‘I’ve no interest in it. Write whatever you like, whatever you like. I want only some proper paper.’ And she snatched it out of Lady Kingston’s lap. ‘Those poor men,’ she said, resuming her seat at the writing-desk. ‘Those poor men, they haven’t my mettle, you see, and they’re being kept here because of me, and George… I will make this right.’

Smoothing Lady Kingston’s much finer paper with her forearms, Anne picked up the quill on the desk. It was not hers, but it would do. ‘I suppose you’ve got better ink than me, too,’ she said to Lady Kingston, and began to write.

I’m a member of a writing group. There are no hacks in this group, no one who doesn’t have a chance, and we’re all somewhere in this blasted writing-to-publication process, either debuting or waiting on editor feedback or querying literary agents. No one in this group complains about the process, or ignores its guidelines, or misbehaves. I cannot describe how alone I would have felt in this universe over the past year without them. And from them I learn: there are bad days, very bad days. Sometimes this is prompted by circumstance, sometimes by a crisis of confidence, sometimes both.

Yesterday I had a bad day, a very bad day. I was angry at my novel and angry about the economy and generally feeling petulant and petty and all the other bratty p-words. It was rough going. But this morning I woke up, feeling like shit, and had a small epiphany while brushing my teeth: the sinkhole economy is, in a way, a gift. Why? Because we - writers, trying to break in - have to be really, really good. If you can sell a novel in this economy, if you can convince strangers to spend money taking a chance on you, you’re gold.

So there it is: we have to be really, really good. It means taking what you thought was good enough and bashing at it until it’s better, better, the best you can make it, and then going back and making it better still. This economy is making sharp artists of us, because no one’s going to pay attention unless you’re better, better, better than everyone else.

There really is no use whining about it; that’s not going to get you on shelves. Yesterday I whined about it; today I determined to do something about it. Hence this teaser. I wasn’t going to post one today, because it seemed too difficult a thing to do, putting myself out there again. But screw it: that’s what we have to do, and keep doing.

One more thing: in this climate of having to be better than everyone else, of constantly honing and improving and pushing your art to the top of the pile, it is a bloody miracle that my writing group - this group of extraordinary, patient, supportive, gifted people - can even exist. So thank you, Purgatory: I dedicate this gloomy and non-uplifting teaser to you.

Now, back to our Elizabethan adventure. Here we find our heroine, Elizabeth, testing the boundaries of her marriage. Enjoy. Comments and lambasts are &c &c.

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Silence for a moment. His cheeks are pink now; there is some satisfaction in that. ‘Stop it,’ he says. ‘I am tired. You are my wife. You will behave. I needn’t defend soldiering to you.’

I have behaved! How I have behaved! ‘Sufficeth this to prove my theme withal!‘ I shout. There are poems about war: writing and soldiering, joined in two lines from Gascoigne’s Posies, a new discovery. ‘That every bullet hath a lighting place!‘

He crosses the room to me in two strides. The back of my head is in one hand, my shoulder in the other, his grip strong enough to leave a mark. ‘You do not shout at me,’ he says in that same low voice. ‘You do not raise your voice to me, or to anyone. Do you understand? I will not have you raise your voice. I do not do it; you will not do it. There will be no more,’ he says, steadily, ‘no more shouting.’

I stare up at him. I have made a game of this argument. I have treated him as I might have treated Edmund, years ago. I wanted this, I think. I asked for this.

He seems calm, yet his eyes are larger now, unblinking, looking down at me. He jerks my head. ‘Do you understand?’ he asks.

‘Yes,’ I reply, in a voice as low as his - in my reading voice. ‘I understand. I am not a child.’

He lets go of me by pushing my head and shoulder from him. My hood falls from my hair, drops to the floor; in backing away from him, I step on it. It is ruined, I see when I pick it up. George is still standing close, too close; he sees the hood and takes it from me. ‘See what you’ve done,’ he says, holding it up, and I am surprised to see that he is close to tears. ‘No shouting. No violence. See what you have destroyed.’ Again he looks at the hood, a plain thing, a few shillings. ‘Act like an animal again and I shall cage you.’

Did I know that my arguments would bring about such a reaction? I think I did. But the hood surprises me: a thing of no great value, easily replaced, and he holds as if it is a dead child, his eyes red-rimmed. Not once has he raised his voice.

‘I am not an unkind man,’ he says. ‘I am not an unfair man.’ Still he holds the hood. ‘I would be a good husband to you, Elizabeth.’ How long has it been since someone said my name? ‘I would be a good husband, but you mustn’t raise your voice. Not ever.’

‘I am sorry,’ I tell him, and mean it. ‘It will not happen again.’

‘Then I am pleased,’ he says, and that crooked smile - the one he wore when we first met - finds its way to his mouth. ‘I am pleased. Do something with this.’ He hands me the hood. ‘I don’t want to see it again.’ He touches my shoulder gently - my sore shoulder - and kisses my temple. ‘I will sleep before supper, I think,’ he says. ‘It’s been a long journey.’ He kisses me once more and leaves the room.

This is what we do, when we marry: we look for sores to pick at. We find ways to hurt each other, because it is of great value to do so. I stare after my husband. He has shown his hand to me; I learn and remember: I cannot shout; I cannot destroy objects, however small their worth. I know how to cause pain.

You mustn’t think that I enjoy such a thing, that I seek to inflict pain. I don’t. I am kind, if heartless - I cannot love this man, any more or less than I could love Edmund. I have no desire to hurt him. But it is good to know how, just in case.

I did a stupid thing last night, filed firmly under It Seemed Like A Good Idea at the Time.

Wait: back up. I’ve gotten into my story, as PG Wodehouse would say, like a scalded cat. Some context:

I am on submission. This means that I have written a novel and found a literary agent for it, and now that agent is trying to find me an editor - in other words, trying to sell my book. I will not lie and say that this is fun. In a way it’s more heart-wrenching even than querying, because rejections don’t mean that I can disappear back into anonymity and make my pitch or my manuscript better: all I can do is sit on my hands and wait. I will say that I think it’s Good For Me in the same way that querying was - it’s teaching me the business; it’s informing the artistic choices I’m making for my second novel; it’s making my skin thicker. It’s another induction.

My part in this phase of the process is small. I read editor comments, as forwarded by my agent, and I wear my t-shirt that says BRING IT ON day after day. I wait. I try to make myself as attractive as possible.

Enter last night.

Last night my husband and I went to a shabbos potluck, a modest dinner with some other graduate students, at which we ate spinach salad, quiche, and tiramisu and talked about the future, the universe, and traffic laws. It was a good night.

When I got home, I posted this to Twitter: I WALKED HOME WITH NO PANTS ON. NO PANTS AT ALL.

I woke up this morning to a flurry of replies: ‘What happened?’ ‘Oh God, Sarah, what have you done now?’ ‘Are we talking North American pants or British pants?’

I was mortified, and I deleted the tweet. Here is the story: I wore my favourite pair of jeans to this dinner. I’ve had them for years, and have been refusing for months to acknowledge their deterioration. At the dinner, I went outside to take a phone call, sat on a ledge, and heard a loud rip. I jumped up, realised what the sound was, and sat down again. Another rip.

The jeans were falling right off of me, half an hour’s walk from home. Worse yet, when I tried to walk, the rip dug into the back of one of my legs and scraped against it, causing indescribable pain. These jeans weren’t going without a fight.

I stayed as immobile as possible for the remainder of the night, leaning up against walls, taking tiny steps when I had to, and acting like nothing was wrong. When we had finished washing the dishes, Mike and I said our goodbyes and starting trooping off home with four other students. I made the best small talk I could, and walked as fast as I could in these jeans that were no longer remotely shaped to house my legs. Finally, enough forks in the road came that Mike and I were on our own. I braved about half a block - seriously, I don’t know what it was, but this tear felt like a dagger in the back of my leg - and then gave up and ran into a phone booth.

Reader, I took my jeans off. In a phone booth.

This isn’t as bad as it sounds. I was wearing a black mackintosh that reached just below my knees. As far as the world knew, I was wearing a mac with a skirt and heels. It was a warm night. Mike looked slightly askance, and I told him that he was welcome to walk twenty feet in front of me if he wanted to. But no: I looked perfectly civilised. The only thing that might have given me away was the folded - inasmuch as a shapeless shift of denim can be folded - pair of jeans in the crook of my elbow.

I came down with a fit of the giggles anyway, and when we got home, I tweeted that I had walked home with no pants on, which was perfectly true. But looking at the tweet in the unforgiving light of morning, I realised how it might look, and that I had to take better care of how I came across in public.

Back to being on submission. I have written the best novel I know how to write and I have gotten a supremely good agent for it. Now I’m waiting on a verdict. I have never once in this process gotten a rejection and thought that person rejected me because that person had no vision or didn’t care about art. I may have railed at the ceiling a little bit, of course, but in the end I still put my faith in the industry and do my best to acknowledge how little I know. Marketing, distribution, indigestion - I have come to the point in the merry-go-round at which my control over what happens next is severely limited.

It reminds me of a story my dad used to tell me when I worried about being popular. Don Juan and his friend, my dad told me, were going for a walk, when Don Juan stopped to tie his shoes. At that moment, an enormous boulder careened across the path about six feet in front of them.

The friend said, ‘Thank God you stopped to tie your shoes! Otherwise we would have been flattened by that boulder!’

Don Juan replied, ‘On another day, I might have stopped to tie my shoes right where the boulder landed, and we would have been flattened anyway.’

The friend said, ‘If that’s true, what control do we have over our destiny?’

Don Juan replied, ‘We can only do the best possible job of tying our shoes.’

And that’s all I can do: if I want to be a writer, my first duty is to write as well as I can as often as I can. If I want to be published, I can refrain from tweeting what might be interpreted as a confession of public nudity. That tweet reminded me of how much is, in fact, in my own hands. So from now on, I will have at my art with a will, and tweet with care.

Till next time, &c &c

This is a relic from the novel I had to abandon in favour of the current work-in-progress. I hope to return to it one day if I have a publisher who can indulge me (or if I don’t); for the moment, it’s relegated to my free time. I’ll return to my Elizabethan adventure next week.

The novel is called A Castle in Putney, set in the present day, and follows the adventures of Clara Stafford and her unlikely family in and around her eponymous home. In this scene, her brother and sister - four and eight - have just come in from an afternoon playing in the mud, and Clara is reluctantly conscripted into giving them a bath.

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1996

“Should I put them in the washer?” the now-nude Henry asks, holding up his clothes.

“Yes, into the washer,” Suzanne says, “and into the bath with you.” She goes into the kitchen and calls for Clara.

But Clara has gone into her bedroom and closed the door: she is fifteen and wants to be alone. She’s done her bit, played with the children. Now she pulls out The Liar and immerses herself in the life of public schoolboys.

Eleanor and Henry were born after Suzanne finished her doctoral dissertation, which is why they are called Eleanor and Henry, after the twelfth-century king and queen of infamous memory. Clara is just Clara, and she feels cheated. She’s never asked after the origins of her own name, but she knows enough about her parents to know that she couldn’t have been named after Clara in The Nutcracker. Like wine, opera, and cooking, Clara’s parents tried ballet and found that they couldn’t appreciate it enough. Books, newspapers, Suzanne’s covert cigarettes, and the mounds: that is where all the clues are.

Clara was born before the dissertation had even begun.

She can hear Henry fiddling with the faucets in the bathroom down the hall and knows that disaster will strike soon. She listens for sound on the stairs, footfalls in the vast corridor, but hears nothing. No, not nothing: Henry has got the water started, and Clara hears a visceral blast that ricochets off the sides of the tub; she hears Henry’s scream of pleasure. Hissing a sigh through her teeth, she throws down her book and crashes out of her bedroom.

“Henry!” she shouts over the din of the water as she walks down the corridor. “Henry!” The corridor is a long one, and the water that courses through the Byzantine pipes when a toilet is flushed or a tap is turned on can be heard everywhere. It’s a castle, after all. A real castle, with turrets and all. Clara wanted a turret for her own, but her parents were worried. When you’re older, they kept saying, until Clara gave up. “You idiot,” she mutters, about Henry, as she opens the bathroom door.

“I did it I did it!” Henry crows over the water.

“You sure did,” Clara says, leaning over him to turn the water off. “Feel clean yet?” she asks.

“I don’t know,” says Henry, earnestly, looking down at himself.

Clara inspects him. He is, really, only dirty where his clothes didn’t cover him sufficiently: around his ankles; his hands (and, by extension, the taps, Clara observes); his face; his forearms. Clara swishes her hand around in the water, which hasn’t had the chance to heat up. “Are you cold, Henry?”

“No,” says Henry.

She turns the hot tap on anyway. “Shall we clean you off with the poof?” By poof Clara means her bath lily, which she uses for Henry’s baths because she likes him, and because she’s long forgotten how to use ordinary washcloths. He screams with glee, and she takes it down, using (again) her own body wash, which smells of nutmeg, to get the mud off her small brother. She will scrub his back and his arms and his feet and his armpits, but she hands the poof to him for his chest and his private parts. “Do your bits,” she says, and he does.

Eleanor bangs the door open. Clara sees that she, too, has no clothes on. “I have to pee,” she says, and makes for the toilet.

“We have a lot of bathrooms,” Clara mutters, watching Henry again.

“I should have a bath too,” Eleanor announces from the toilet, her legs swishing back and forth.

“You’re not dirty, Eleanor,” Clara says.

Eleanor hops off the toilet, flushes it, and makes her way to the enormous free-standing tub. Watching Clara narrowly, she climbs in.

“Mom!” Clara hollers. Henry has no problem with the intrusion of his sister into his ablutions: he scoots forward and Eleanor sits behind him. A great splash hits Clara in the face. “Mom!” she bellows again.

“I need to wash,” Eleanor says, and Henry, obligingly, hands her the bath lily.

“No!” Clara says, before she can stop herself, but Eleanor has already found the body wash. She dollops some generously onto the poof and begins primly rubbing herself. Henry, finished, has begun splashing, for something to do. Clara looks mournfully at the almost-empty bottle. She snatches it away and puts it up into the caddy by the shower, where Eleanor can’t reach it. Nutmeg fumes fill the bathroom and Clara thinks, for a moment, that she’s going to be sick.

It’s Arthur who shows up to rescue Clara. Clara can’t help herself: “Where’s Mom?” she asks.

“Downstairs,” Arthur says. “Now, what have we got here?”

He’s lucky he can’t smell. The nutmeg and steam fill the air until Clara, dripping, stands up to leave. Arthur is already on his knees by the tub. “Rinse, rinse, rinse,” he says, pouring water over Eleanor, who squeals. “Done rinsing?”

They both nod, and Arthur scoops them out of the tub, one on each side of him. “Grab the towels, Clara,” he says, and she does, throwing them over her two siblings like blankets over camels as they scream and kick with laughter in their father’s arms. Arthur carries them gamely through the bathroom door and down the hall. Clara looks around the bathroom, which is now quite as wet as the mounds and the grass and the footpaths outside. The tub is still full of grey water: her father never quite gets it right. Her mother will be horrified when she sees it. Clara tries, very hard, to turn on her heel and go back to her bedroom, back to her book, but finds that she can’t. She pulls the plug, which slurps and gurgles, and then grabs a towel and begins mopping the floor.

Suzanne, she knows, will still be angry that Clara used one of the good towels for a chore like this. That Clara doesn’t care about.

The psychiatrist approached the mess without proper respect for the mess, Garp thought. The psychiatrist’s object was to clear the head; it was Garp’s opinion that this was usually accomplished (when it was accomplished) by throwing away all the messy things. That is the simplest way to clean up, Garp knew. The trick is to use the mess - to make the messy things work for you.

That passage is from my favourite chapter of my favourite book: Chapter Nine, ‘The Eternal Husband’, of The World According to Garp by John Irving. It is a book about a writer. Most books about writers don’t work; this one does. If you haven’t read it, I suggest you do.

So many of my revelations come when I’m desperate for new TV. I avoided watching Grey’s Anatomy for, what is it now, almost five years. It sounded like Ally McBeal with doctors, and I was never interested. I have now watched two episodes and haven’t been dissuaded of my original assumption, but I’ll keep watching because it’s summer and there’s fuckall else on. I’m an optimist.

I watched the second episode on my Sunday break between school and writing - I needed something to help me switch gears in my head. It made me think about story. When you’re sitting on your hands wondering if your novel will ever sell - or after the general quality of your present and future works - a lot of things inspire you to think about story in a melancholy way. This second episode of Grey’s made me think of Garp, and what he might think of the ‘mess’ of the story arc and how it was ‘cleaned up’.

The premise of Grey’s Anatomy is a bunch of rather gorgeous young doctors working in a hospital whose only complications are allegorical. This episode I watched today begins with the main character, Meredith Grey, talking about the importance of boundaries - personal, professional, and social. It ends with her saying that boundaries ‘don’t keep other people out; they just fence you in’, after which observation she takes her turtlenecked, leather-handbagged gorgeous self off to the parking lot to hang with her other doctor friends.

I have no objection to this, but it strikes me that it is writing, and not psychiatry, that attempts to ‘clean up’. Psychiatry seems at least to recognize that you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs. In writing, there is simply no room for broken eggs.

This episode had one object in mind: show interns learning the ropes and growing up and getting to know each other. How distracting would it be if one of them were ugly, right, or overweight, because then you’d wonder how an ugly person came to be a doctor, and that would have to be a part of the story. Fat people can be secondary characters, not principals. This is of course true of most television, most film; and the best that novelists can do with such a thorny issue is avoid physical description of their characters at all.

Wouldn’t it be lovely if you could have an ugly main character without making an issue of it? I know I’m not the first person to say that. (’It’s like,’ Liz Lemon says, ‘those Dove commercials never even happened.’)

When I first queried The Fidelity Trial, I did it with the mess left in. I was lucky enough to find an agent who was willing to work with me to make my story a story, with a beginning, middle, and end. I wanted ugliness, illiteracy, and people peeing their pants. (How likely is it, really, that you could keep vigil in a closet for a night without having to go to the bathroom? Come on.) But that didn’t make a story. If the lady pees her pants (or whichever garment you prefer) during her all-night vigil, you forget what the vigil’s about.

People say that the best art reflects life; I don’t know if that’s true. I think we’ve enough life around us to reflect life, and that art should do something else, or at least come at it from a different angle - even holding up a mirror to something makes it look different, makes its nose more crooked or straight.

When asked about his portrayal of Henry VIII, Jonathan Rhys-Meyers says, ‘The reality is that viewers don’t want to see an obese, red-haired guy on a TV series.’ He makes it seem as though he’s made a discomfiting artistic decision, there, and defends it by going on to say that ‘nobody can tell me that how I played Henry isn’t right.’ So here we have Henry at a different angle - and who’s to say it’s the wrong one? I’m a Tudor historian, and I can’t say that. We all know that he was well on his way to fattitude by 1537, but his being fat, in a way, is like my maid of honour peeing herself - it’s become a distraction, and an excuse not to look at what else he was.

It’s another way of rearranging the mess, right: not using it, as per Garp’s instructions, but clearing a space on the floor so that you can move and look around. The Tudors eliminates Fat Henry from the mix, and that’s problematic, because with it they also eliminate Henry’s own character arc: you can’t show someone hardening, which is what Henry did, if he just goes from gorgeous bastard move to gorgeous bastard move. But it’s also interesting and clever: it makes you more willing to look at him, to understand him as a human being, to trust him again and again, because you want to trust Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, no matter how many asshole stunts he pulls.

But The Tudors is airbrushed fare: you’re not meant to see anything unpleasant beyond throats being slit, so it’s dangerous to read too much into it. The show was never meant to be about reality, which makes its occasional genuine insights all the more alarming.

I think what bugs me about Grey’s is that it has no such cartoonish claim: it wants to be gritty, to be real, to be frightening and cute and funny and poignant - in short, to run the gamut. And yes, it might be distracting if Ellen Pompeo had a huge boil on her nose or one tit bigger than the other. But what I do find distracting is the idea that, after a shift of however many dozens of hours, she doesn’t look dirty; her face is free of mascara flakes (not possible); her pants don’t have that accordion of wrinkles from sitting down that all pants have except when they’re fresh out of the wash.

So too with shows like 30 Rock, for all that I love my 30 Rock. Liz Lemon is meant to be a rough caricature of Tina Fey 15 years ago, the old Tina Fey who was a full 35 pounds heavier than she is now. So the show leaves the food in, and leaves us watching in torment while new skinny Tina Fey eats her way through another week in the life and never so much as feels bloated. There are a lot of explanations for this, and I’ve made them all - a bag of cheezies a day isn’t going to make you fat if that’s all you eat, for example. (This is not a diet. This is not a lesson.) But still, it stops you, every now and again - you love it at first, because she likes just what you like! And then a few episodes in, you look at her, and you look at you, and you think that Liz Lemon must have some secret she’s keeping from you. And maybe she does! Maybe season four will be all about Liz Lemon’s Tapeworm. Who knows.

I think my point is that the viewing and reading public can probably be trusted with seeing a bit more of the mess without becoming distracted. The problem with The Fidelity Trial, in its incarnation circa 2008, was that the story wasn’t complete - not that there were too many elements, but that there were vital elements missing. When you know what your story is - when you have your beginning, middle, and end - then you can start pouring on the mascara-flake detail that gives it dimension and makes it real.

And if you fail to do that, well, you’ll have a monstrously successful primetime television show that some unwashed bint in Cambridge will waste an hour complaining about.

(I can’t believe I wanted to post about the art of the mess and ended up with such a telling microcosm of the Achilles heel of all of my first drafts. Try clearing room on your virtual floor to sort this shit out.)

Till next time, &c &c.

This morning, in aid of putting off the monumental number of things I must accomplish today, I was reading my old LiveJournal posts. It may be a surprise to some of you that I have a LiveJournal account, and rightly so: I’ve been a very silent member since about 2003. I only signed up to read other people’s entries, and never got into the habit of posting myself, except when what I had to say wasn’t interesting or confident enough for my website.

I had a comparatively lucky querying experience. I started in June 2008 with a very mediocre draft of my novel, and signed with my agent in early October. Still: the summer of 2008 was the longest summer of my life. Also it rained a lot. But on 16 June - almost a year ago, now - I did a brave thing: a sort of querying version of counting my blessings. For all you out there at some point in the process, it might be an interesting read, so I’m posting it here.

I find it especially poignant because my agent is currently submitting my manuscript to editors (Dear Editors: I’m Really Nice), so I’m waiting in another way now. So, herewith: the state of Sarah’s mind on 16 June 2008, about a fortnight into the querying process.

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I feel the need to say this while I’m still in the tall grass, viz agentless: I think the process of finding representation is a good one. From everything I’ve read, and everything I’m going through, I can’t imagine a more symbiotic way of acclimatising the virgin author to the publishing world.

Not sarcasm. I really mean it.

Here’s what you do: you finish your book (this is very important), you edit your book (also important), and when it’s the best you think you can make it (which is different from it being the best it can be), you spend approximately two months (in my case) putting together a query letter and synopsis (this is dreadful). After this, you trawl online for hours and hours building up a shortlist of agents you’d like to query (in my case, all across the ocean, because there isn’t a single British citizen who isn’t sick to the tits of Anne Boleyn, it seems). Adhering to guidelines and personalising each letter, off they go, your first ten queries, into the world.

And then you wait.

Boom: rejection #1. Boom: rejection #2. Myself, I created several folders in my Gmail: “Queries”, “Submissions Awaiting Response”, “Failed Attempts” (this is where I put my rejections instead of throwing them away), and glee of glees, “Partial/Full Requested”. They are cross-referenced. This, and smoking: the only fully organized parts of my life.

I’m still waiting. The waiting is horrible. Horrible. I can’t stress it enough with the horrible. But I get this slightly nauseating feeling that it’s good for me. Because it seems that publishing itself is a waiting game: one needs to be accustomed to waiting. It still means that one lives on New York time and one refreshes one’s email until the page crashes. I’ll have to be a bit more grown-up than I am now before that stops happening.

But here’s the other thing that’s good: once you’ve got an agent, you’ve got an agent. In the Panglossian case (”our noses were made to carry spectacles, and behold! So they do”), it seems the author and the agent come together in the best of all possible worlds, to each do what each does best. In the author’s case, to write, to learn, to follow instructions; in the agent’s, to sell, to mentor, to set up High-Powered Meetings with Important People. And each side is equally motivated, for whichever reasons. As I read it earlier this morning: your agent has no reason to sit on her hands. She’s just as invested in selling your book as you are.

I thought once I sent my manuscript out to Important People I would go mad finding errors in the text or worse yet, thinking it was worthless - curiously, this hasn’t happened. I’m starting to genuinely see the merit and the novelty in the story. I wonder if maybe I’ve been on drugs for the past month.

I know this probably sounds hopelessly naive. But when I’m feeling good about this process, I need to record it. For posterity like. So there it is. On this Monday, with the smell of sweet fig and cinnamon toast in the air, at 9:58 am in London and (sigh) 4:58 eh em in New York, I feel good. We’ll see how long it lasts.

A longer teaser this week, from the work-in-progress. You can find other teasers for this work here and here. As usual, comments and lambasts are welcomed.

This week Elizabeth, our heroine, has just gotten married, and is on the threshold of a new life. But on her wedding night, she’s having a bout of insomnia.

&&&

No, the snoring - these hours of sleeplessness - are far more painful than anything he did when he was awake. The snoring is more than sound, I find: it is an insult; it is calculated, I am sure, to make me suffer. Something about it stings me like toothache, like panic. Every time he draws breath, my ribcage closes tighter.

I shall have to find a way to command a second chamber. My parents sleep apart. How uncommon can it be? Now I try to remember remedies, remember what has made me sleepy in the past. Warm wine? Perhaps some warm wine. I climb out of bed quietly - though I do not know why I make this effort not to wake him - and take up my dressing gown and my candle, which I can still light from the dying fire. In the next room, surely, there will be wine.

But in the next room, I find that I am not alone. The fire is lit, and two candles too. A woman is asleep in a chair next to the fire, long, messy, red curls framing a face I cannot see. I know she is sleeping not only because her head is tipped forward, but because I can hear her breathing: a gentler sound than my husband’s, but a snore for all that. The door has opened and closed soundlessly, and I move on bare tiptoe across the cold wooden floor towards the sideboard, where the wine is, and where I can see this woman properly.

It is Lettice. I hold my breath and listen to her, and in listening I am at peace, drowsy even, despite my heart bounding in my chest.

The wine. I came for the wine. I set my candle on the sideboard and reach for the silver flagon. But my hands are shaking; it clashes against the goblet. The sound is not a loud one, but it rises above the crackle of the fire, above her breathing, above mine, and she wakes.

‘Madam!’ she cries, and although the act of her moving to her feet puts her in command, I see her making infinitesimal adjustments, compensations for my having seen her like this: she arranges her hair; she smoothes her dressing gown; she runs her hands across her face. ‘I thought you asleep,’ she says.

I have returned to the act of pouring the wine, although it is a hollow remedy, now, as I look at her. Still I bring the goblet to my lips in a bid to save myself talking. ‘I could not sleep,’ I say, after a moment.

We met yesterday, Lettice and I, but I feel years older, years younger.

She is fully awake now. ‘Can I bring you some lavender oil?’ she asks. Lavender oil. I would have no idea what to do with lavender oil. ‘It is to help you sleep,’ she says. ‘It works very well for the Queen, who’ - she pauses - ‘has great cares, and finds herself unable to sleep. Sometimes.’ She looks at me. ‘It was the Queen sent me,’ she says. ‘To ensure you passed a comfortable night.’

‘That was very kind of her,’ I manage. ‘And if lavender oil is good enough for her Majesty, I am sure it will help me very much.’

Lettice disappears through yet another door I had not noticed, and it seems no time at all before she returns with a bottle in her hand. ‘Sit,’ she says, and I am relieved that she is speaking with her old authority.

‘Relax your head.’ I tip my head against the back of the chair, and would be looking up if I dared open my eyes. I feel her fingers running through my hair, straightening it, pulling it back. ‘Can you smell it?’ she asks, and at once I can: she is wafting her hand underneath my nose. I nod. ‘Good,’ she says. ‘The therapy is in the smell.’ But then her fingers are at my temples, rubbing in warm circles, first forward, then back, and the therapy is there: it is in her hands. ‘You feel the pressure?’ she asks, and her breath - the smell of sleep - is on my face. ‘Just that pressure, in circles, front and back.’

‘Yes,’ I murmur.

‘Good,’ she says. ‘You’ll have to learn this. The Queen needs all her ladies to be able to help her sleep.’

And now her breath is gone; she feels far away. This is a lesson, and she is my tutor. But I will not think on that tonight. I keep my eyes closed.

When I wake, my neck hurts. Lettice has returned to her chair, and is looking at me. I feel blurry, contented. ‘You will be able to sleep now,’ she says, and I smile at her. She does not smile back. ‘Return to your husband,’ she says, and all at once I am wide awake again, as surely as if she had thrown water in my face. We are silent, and I listen: I can hear the snores in the next room. I look at Lettice; she looks blankly back.

‘Where do you sleep?’ I ask.

I succumb again. To add to the frazzle of writing in present tense for the first time, I’ve decided to convert the entirety of the Elizabethan work-in-progress to first person. I welcome comments and lambast. Herewith:

&&&

Freed at last, the sun melting into the hedges beyond my bedroom window, I find the white cotton gown and drape it against the back of my chair. My writing desk - they allow me that much, to write in the open! - is ready with pen, ink, and paper. Quickly, I scrawl:

They speak of my marriage. I find I must see you one more time. Meet me tomorrow at midday under the tree. E.S.

I fold the paper carefully and write Edmund’s name on the outside. No time for sealing wax. I ball up my soiled gown into one arm and trip downstairs - all the way downstairs - to the laundry.

Charlie, the laundress’s son, is there as I hoped, sitting on the wooden steps and jogging a hot meat pie from hand to hand, blowing on it.

‘Heigh-ho, Charlie, my soldier of fortune,’ I say, softly so as not to startle him. Still he bounds up from the step, almost drops the pie, and bobs his head to me. ‘Are you busy, Charlie?’

‘Not busy, miss,’ says Charlie. ‘Just finishing my supper, miss.’

‘It looks a treat,’ I say, but inwardly: God’s teeth, can’t you eat that thing faster?

‘Would you have me on a errand, miss?’

I smile at him. ‘I wouldn’t want you to let your pie grow cold,’ I say.

‘No, see, look, miss,’ he says, blowing loudly on the pie, and then eating half of it in one impressive, messy bite. He exhales rapidly, several times - ‘Hooh! Hooh! Hooh!’ - and I can imagine the meat scorching his little throat.

‘Now, Charlie, you needn’t - ‘

He swallows, makes an incoherent noise, and then the rest of the pie disappears.

We wait together, while he chews. His eyes begin to water.

‘Now,’ Charlie manages, swallowing the last of it, ‘miss, what were it you wanted me to do?’

‘What a fine man you will make,’ I say, and mean it. Charlie’s watering eyes are earnest upon me, awaiting his task. ‘I need you to take this’ - I hand him the grass-stained gown - ‘to your mother for cleaning. Will you bundle it in with the other cotton, and make sure no one sees it?’

‘I will, miss.’ And he will: he’s done it before.

‘And I should like it if you took this’ - I hold up the letter - ‘to the inn.’ He makes to snatch it up, but I stop him - ‘Wipe your hands, Charlie, there’s a good lad!’ This done, as daintily and quickly as possible on his short pants, I pass him the letter. ‘It is for friend Edmund, and do you make sure you pass it straight into his own hands. You can do this?’

‘Of course, miss!’ I can all but see his mind whirring, planning his adventure.

‘You must go quickly, before the stars pop out,’ I tell him.

‘I’ll leave right away,’ Charlie says, impressively. ‘And I’ll run.’ I press a penny into his hand. ‘I need nothing of that, miss!’ he cries, and makes to hand it back to me.

‘Tut, a soldier of fortune must have his fortune,’ I say. ‘Off you go now, before it gets any darker. And Charlie,’ I say, pulling his sleeve and bending down to him, ‘you remember to tell no one.’

He nods, three times for good measure, and is gone.

I have a paper due in seven hours. Like, a really important one. So I thought I’d post here about music. Not the music of 18th-century midwives, but music from the bygone 1990s.

So, the TV seasons are ending. I’ve become very reliant on television at the end of a day: it’s become part of my ablutions routine, along with the toner, the moisturiser, and the pot of tea. House, Law & Order, Henry VIII: Mind of a Tyrant. These are the things I watch on my own. With Mike, 30 Rock and The Office. But the seasons are ending, and I have to get creative. So I’ve decided to start watching movies.

Not a movie a night, mind. I have some other things to do in this cloistered world of mine. Portions of movies.

Last night I watched a whole one: Zack & Miri Make A Porno. I’d had this in my queue for quite some time, and had avoided it if there was anything else to watch. Mike saw Pineapple Express and didn’t like it, and there was general disapproval of Seth Rogen at Casa Chalk. Besides which, I find Kevin Smith a bit hard to take sometimes, not for the Controversial Reasons, but because his male main characters always end up being Saccharine Good Guy Who Loves Women. You always know how these movies are going to end.

Zack & Miri didn’t disappoint, in that regard. Seth Rogen is actually a real sweetie, did you know? The movie was more or less as advertised, complete with Traci Lords twat-bubble-blowing. The thing that stuck with me about it, though, was that it began with a high school reunion. There was a high school reunion on 30 Rock recently, for the 38-year-old Liz Lemon, very a la Grosse Pointe Blank, replete with Simple Minds and Wham!. Zack & Miri made me realise that I thought all high school reunions played 80s music: boy, was I wrong.

The eponymous main characters graduated high school in 1998, so what I heard was a lot of Live, Pixies, and Marcy Playground. For the first time I felt like I was at my own high school reunion (although mine would probably feature drunk renditions of numbers from the Threepenny Opera; my high school was very ‘two years jazz, three years tap’). I went through high school in time for Radiohead, Beck, and The Prodigy. Escaped just before the advent of Britney Spears. Got a lot of Dave Matthews in there. I didn’t think it mattered so much.

Watching this movie and listening to this music, though, I understood that I am now officially part of an era - the mid- to late-90s - and that the market no longer caters to me. I became lazy about discovering new music a long time ago, and I’ve always been something of a late bloomer: in high school, was I listening to Dave Matthews? Nope. I was listening to Elvis Costello and XTC. And Primus. Writing fraught poetry, I was. Learning to smoke. In a high school full of sequined hats and Daring to be Different, I wore the same pinstriped blazer every day and spent almost no time with people my own age.

I think that’s part of the problem. My boyfriend in high school - and the friends I thereby appropriated - were all three, four, and five years older than me. When I got to university, the first boyfriend I had - and the friends I thereby appropriated - were seven and eight years older than me. Luckily, this was when 80s music was experiencing its first retro revival, so we were speaking the same language, the language of Dexy’s Midnight Runners and Big Country and Wall of Voodoo.

The thing these two boyfriends - and their posses - had in common was a not-at-all-veiled contempt for Canadian music. I remember sitting in uni boyfriend’s living room one night at about three in the morning - sometime in 1997 - trying to sober up to go home, and watching a Prodigy video that I didn’t even like. Boyfriend says: ‘Why can’t Canada do something like this?’

I had no answers. I was drunk.

Because I was busy listening to Andy Partridge and Elvis Costello and They Might Be Giants and the Sugarcubes and goddamned Pizzicato Five, I more or less figured that the music targeted at me from my late teens to my mid-twenties had passed me by. I remember owning Odelay by Beck - it got me through a very long, very cold Greyhound trip over Christmas 1996. But other than that, I didn’t spend hours in HMV scouring the shelves for the Hits. Somehow, though, the Hits stuck in my head.

Like: ‘Steal My Sunshine’ by Len. Second year uni? First. What a silly song. I don’t remember especially liking it, but there it was on Zack & Miri, and I was rushed back to driving in my 1985 Honda Accord, Sophie, to campus from my parents’ house in the west-end ‘burbs, circa 97-98. Radio was what I had in that car. Power fucking 92.

The thing is, I knew what it was OK to like back then, and what must be scoffed at, and what could be enjoyed on an Ironic Level. (I LOVED ‘I Want You’ by Savage Garden, listened to it loudly and with impugnity, but knew it was an Ironic Level song, right up until the moment that I was irretrievably done with it. Earlier tonight, on a nostalgia kick, I found it on YouTube, and found myself just as sick of it as I became that day in 1997.) I was With It, even if I really didn’t think I was. Now I’m not sure. I shake like an old biddy when people ask what recent music I like - I like the Killers? Hot Chip? Sufjan Stevens sort of? Is that OK? Are Soul Coughing still a thing? Are the Tremeloes still Number One, as Roddy Doyle would say?

See, you don’t realise this shit until you navigate out of your own age group. With my friends in Edmonton, my friends in London, we could warble to Blue Rodeo and measure how cool we were by what our parents raised us on. I didn’t realise I wasn’t keeping up until last night, when I heard the music of My Generation and realised that it was released more than ten fucking years ago. 80s music I’m less self-conscious about - that wasn’t my music. I just borrowed it. But Dave Matthews is mine; Radiohead is mine. Beck is fucking mine. And so, unfortunately, is Marcy Playground (yeah, I got that one CD too, back when people did such things).

Does this mean I’m too old? Done for? I don’t think so. I think these things are cyclical. My mom went mad for Michael Jackson in her mid-thirties. She liked Tori Amos when Tori Amos was underground. She still finds cool things to listen to. But I’ll have to ask her, one of these days, if she ever went through a vacuum period when she just stopped seeking music out, and how long it lasted. I don’t mind the break from fashion - I like the music I like, even if I can’t talk about it confidently in public. But I refuse to become one of these bints who says that a given decade didn’t produce anything worthwhile. I know there’s value in the music out there now - a lot of it - and I’m just not noticing it enough.

And now that I’ve used up all the m-dashes in my repertory for the evening, I figure it’s safe to go back to the life-defining meisterwerk.

Till next time, &c.

Yes, I’ve been away for a bit. Doing school stuff. Yes, work-related work, who knew. I had this great post in mind called ‘WHY BRITISH WOMEN ARE UGLY’ (Reason 1: the tyranny of the season; Reason 2: the tyranny of trend; Reason 3: the tyranny of the cut, specifically the cap sleeve - and yes, it’s more true here than it is elsewhere), but I thought maybe that wouldn’t make me any friends. And I need friends: good God, how I need friends.

I also let my domain expire. As embarrassing as this little patch of e-real estate has been to me over the years, I’m sure I’d be lost without it. Was very relieved to find that it had survived my perfidy intact.

Husband and I were having a conversation earlier this evening about age. Cambridge is eyeballs-deep in little critters. People who have never once folded a pair of their own trousers. Nice people, yes - very nice - but pipsqueaks. Make me run home and check for crow’s feet like. (I don’t have any. I am blessed. So far.)

We’ve reached our thirties, you see, far from home. We’re lucky fuckers, Mike and I. We’ve had remarkable opportunities and wonderful supportive families. We have our health. We have each other. We have amazing bone structure. Well, he does. What we don’t have is a home.

This isn’t because we’re renting, and it isn’t because we’re foreigners. We know many renting foreigners who have a home. It’s because we’re leaving. We’ll be vamoosing from Cambridge in a few months, back to London - for the moment - and we’re walking around this flat on tiptoe. See, I almost bought a coffee maker this afternoon, marked down to fifteen quid, which even my poor ass can afford. But no - it’d just be another thing to move. Back to instant for Sarah.

We used to have books to mask our lack of taste. In fact, books are my taste - walls and walls of them, and that’s what we had. But they’re all in storage now, or nearly all of them, waiting for the moment when we know we’re home. And knowing us, we’re never going to be sure of that.

So today I make a positive resolution. Cambridge is never going to be home; that much I know. Too many critters. We’re leaving anyway. And I know that at some medium-term point, we’re going to leave London too. But the next place - wherever we live after we’ve left this tyrannically blue flat with its awful thin walls and emo house music - wherever we live next is going to be home. We are going to make it our own. Not by spending buckets of money - that’s not what this is about.

Home begins with a proper coffee maker. And I shall get one.

Till next time &c &c.