sarah eve kelly

Yes, I’m aware that I’ve been tagged by the beautiful and talented Amy Bai to come up with a bunch of horrid horrid lies about myself, and that’s coming soon.

But today: introspection. I’ve got my Leo Kottke on; I’ve got my coffee on; I’ve got these awesome slippers. It’s go time.

I return often to this weird binary that I’ve found myself in since October 2008: that I’m doing two things, for no money, that mean a lot to me, viz. my research and my writing. If you’ll recall, I once suggested knitting as an antidote to all that good fortune. But I haven’t done any knitting since Christmas, and I broke the one rule I had for it: I did it for something other than fun. This is what happens when it’s Christmas and you don’t have stock options: you start knitting furiously, anything you can knit, and give what comes of it to the people you love. For me, it was coasters and potholders (with STRIPES), because I can only do squares and rectangles. Around 20 December my knitting became a bit like my typing speed: I could do three or four coasters in a night. My mother-in-law and I raced each other. And yeah, that was fun. But I remember a moment when I thought this: ‘Tonight I have to get that knitting done.’ That’s when I knew I’d broken the knitting law, and that’s when I dropped knitting.

I really hope I pick it up again. After all, knitting is awesome.

This is when I realised that I’m starting to treat these things I love - my research and my writing - like items on a to-do list. When I realised they were so overwhelming that I had to break them down into bite-sized chunks to make them feasible and achievable. And listen, that’s not cool. I’ve spent enough of my life in offices saying ‘This Isn’t What I Do’. Now I’m living in England - something I’ve wanted more or less my whole life - and I’m doing doctoral studies and writing a novel (two things I’ve wanted arguably longer than that). This is my entire remit. Not only is it what I want to do; it’s what other people want me to do, too. My family helps me; my friends take flattering interest. I am pretty much the luckiest girl in the world.

So whither novel?

When things get too overwhelming, I go under. Not in a bad way - I made it sound dire just there - but I put myself in my own form of sensory deprivation (that sounds dire too). I put my headphones on; I watch TV. I listen to audiobooks. I buzz around the flat like this - balancing my laptop in the crook of my elbow and watching Jack McCoy put the System On Trial, or listening to Alex Jennings reading Nicholas Nickleby - and do the laundry, scrub the kitchen, rearrange the medicine cabinet. I forget I have a phone; I forget I have friends; I forget I have remits, and most especially, I especially forget I have remits that I love. Because that’s the worst of all: if you love it and you’re avoiding it, what in fuck does that mean? I don’t want to know, that’s what.

I’ve got this arsenal of sensory deprivation. I have TV and audiobooks and video games. Mike tells me I keep the flat a little too clean; he comes home and doesn’t know where any of his clothes are. And when the flat is too clean, I know I’m not getting enough work done. I used to think that it was Twitter and Facebook that were eating up my whole life; now I check Facebook about once a month. It’s the TV and the audiobooks and the video games. It’s not procrastination; I’m not really falling behind. But it frightens me that I’m doing what’s expected of me and nothing near like what I know I’m capable of. That I’m sloughing this off - this stuff that I always opined I would give my lifeblood to if I just had the time.

I almost didn’t post this because I thought: hey, it’s lunchtime; time for leftover bolognese and the Season 18 premiere of Law & Order. What a lunch! And then - aha - I see that that’s the problem. I shouldn’t be watching bloody TV with my downtime. I should be reading books. I don’t read enough books. I should be going for walks; I don’t see enough of the world. I should be looking out the window; I should be lying on the floor; I should be sensing things. I should be going back to those places - mental and physical - that made me love reading and writing in the first place. I should be eavesdropping on people down the pub. I should be visiting cemeteries and connecting with the amazing eighteenth-century midwives I admire so much.

Even listening to Dickens is no excuse. It’s all well and good - I recommend it to anyone - but Dickens isn’t what’s selling right now. Dickens tells me about two hundred years ago; I need to either be learning about three hundred years ago, four hundred years ago, or now.

So now I’m surrounded by a mess, a real mess - I can make those really quickly. There’s a sinkful of dishes in the kitchen, a load of linens sitting in the hall, a myriad of Diet Coke cans and books and papers and ointments sitting on my desk. I have to keep the mess. I’m going to spend my lunch hour with my headphones off. I’m going to hear the jackhammer out the window and let the wind in and write. For an hour I’m going to give the world my full attention, just to see what it feels like.

Till next time, &c &c.

1. What did you do in 2009 that you’d never done before?

I successfully defended my PhD research to scholars at Cambridge. I attended a May Ball (to wit: I wore a golden gown; I wore glitter in my hair and on my skin). I got real feedback - good and bad - from real editors at real publishing houses. I mastered Easy Sudoku.

2. Did you keep your New Years’ resolutions, and will you make more for next year?

Resolutions for 2009: a) to feel proud and less angry every day, or most days (no); to keep myself healthy (emphatic no); to keep working hard (yes); to see family and friends abroad more, viz. at all (yes); to be kinder and more attentive to the people I love (spotty).

Resolutions for 2010: to treat England like my home, rather than this place I’m on an extended visit to; to stop coddling myself and work harder; to rely less and less on other people; to drink more tea; to continually develop and redevelop real goals; to bake; to smile more.

3. Did anyone close to you give birth?

I’m at an age now when just about every woman I know is either pregnant, giving birth, or thinking about it. My dear friend Heather Goor had a beautiful daughter named Helena. Beyond that, there were about two dozen separate Big Conversations about The Future and Babies, with several different players involved.

4. Did anyone close to you die?

Thankfully, no.

5. What countries did you visit?

The United States in January and Canada in November-December.

6. What would you like to have in 2010 that you lacked in 2009?

Money.

7. What date from 2009 will remain etched upon your memory, and why?

There are no particular dates this year.

8. What was your biggest achievement of the year?

This is a real tossup, because I struggled a lot with my research, and I struggled a lot with my writing. In the end I managed to make both pass muster - for the moment, anyway. I passed my first Cambridge defence with flying colours and I managed to turn critiques into a novel I feel very proud of. But these are nebulous achievements, always depending on what comes next. So I’m still working.

9. What was your biggest failure?

My attempt to develop a sane, circadian schedule, and to enter each day with a sense of excitement and leave it with a sense of achievement.

10. Did you suffer illness or injury?

No, but I set myself up for both. I need to take better care of myself.

11. What was the best thing you bought?

This year wasn’t much of a year for buying, but I’d have to say my laptop. Though it went through a shirty phase and caused me no end of grief for a little while, it has a lovely springy keyboard and a massive hard drive and I’m very fond of it.

12. Whose behaviour merited celebration?

The extraordinary group of writers I found myself part of. No hacks, no whiners, no no-hopers - just a lot of talented hard workers who take a lot more shit than they deserve. I’m honoured to be among them.

13. Whose behaviour made you appalled and depressed?

I’m thinking of her name, but refuse to put it into such a public forum.

14. Where did most of your money go?

To tiny, death-of-a-thousand-cuts living expenses.

15. What did you get really, really, really excited about?

Going on submission to editors; moving back to London from Cambridge; starting my new novel.

16. What song will always remind you of 2009?

‘Such Great Heights’, Postal Service.

17. Compared to this time last year, are you:

i. happier or sadder? I’d say I’m happier - I spent a lot of this year trying to evolve, and I think I achieved that in a few small ways.

ii. thinner or fatter? Semper eadem, but I’m not as healthy as I was this time last year.

iii. richer or poorer? Unquestionably poorer.
18. What do you wish you’d done more of?

Same as last year: I wish I’d talked to people more. I wish I’d felt more urgency and initiative about things outside my work.

19. What do you wish you’d done less of?

I wish I’d spent fewer of my waking hours feeling afraid. My life has been set up in such a way that I have a massive net of love and light and well-wishers around me, and my fear has been hugely disrespectful of that. Notwithstanding it’s a waste of time and energy: things are what they are; things are what you make them. No sense being afraid.

20. How will you be spending Christmas?

As I always do, with my husband and mother-in-law right here at home. Love the lovely small Christmases.

21. How will you be spending New Year’s Eve?

No idea yet, but I’ve had my surfeit this year of parties that feel like rush-hour Tube carriages. Something quiet with good friends and good music.

22. Did you fall in love in 2009?

I stayed in love. I fell in love again and again.

23. How many one-night stands?

The Cambridge ladies just aren’t into that. Not any I met, anyway.

24. What was your favourite TV program?

I imbibed the BBC’s Robin Hood; I took in some Spooks; some Boston Legal; and some other stuff. But Grey’s Anatomy pretty much dominated my year in television, which the Me of June 2009 would scoff at pretty ceaselessly. But hell, what do I know: it’s a good show. Also, Law & Order has been absolutely bloody flawless this year.

25. Do you hate anyone now that you didn’t hate this time last year?

No. I try not to do that anymore. I almost wish I did: what I’m fighting this year is indifference.

26. What was the best book you read?

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel was a novel that robbed me of all my words. There is no contest.

27. What was your greatest musical discovery?

Reid Jamieson is pretty great. PSAPP. Go Get Go. It was a year of good music, but no particular standouts.

28. What did you want and get?

An iPod Touch, courtesy of pretty much one of the best guys in the world, Colby Cosh. Some clarity about my PhD research, courtesy largely of me. A trip to Canada. Some time with my brother; time with my aunt and uncle; time with my cousins. As of Christmas, a netbook, which means that I have absolutely no gizmo-related excuses not to be a big genius next year.

29.What did you want and not get?

Security. A sense that I’m going where I need to go. I spent a few years of my life being able to trust myself for anything and everything, and I lost that; this year didn’t see it come back.

30. What was your favourite film that you saw for the first time this year?

It was a dismal movie year for me. Frost/Nixon was excellent, but didn’t push me where it hurts. Revolutionary Road was utter kaka. The Reader was all right but I don’t know if I like where it’s taking us. The Young Victoria was gawdawful. Mostly I didn’t see enough movies.

31. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you?

I was in London, in our new flat, and I worked. Later we had a birthday/housewarming knees up and got our inaugural wine stain on the living room carpet. It was - no lie - the best birthday I’ve had in years, thanks to friends and loved ones. I turned thirty-one.

32. What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying?

Trusting myself; being self-sufficient; being confident.

33. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2009?

Static. Almost no new clothes were bought this year. I noticed I have a pair of legs; I put them to some use. Mostly my fashion concept involved losing beautiful earrings, and wearing - as usual - a lot of black, with the odd alarming red top thrown in. Cleaving to cleavage &c.

34. What kept you sane?

I’m not sure anything did, although that does my husband and close friends a terrible disservice. All the insanity was on my end this year, and it was both excellent and terrible, but do I have a single memory of taking a deep breath and seeing everything rationally? Not really.

(Although: writing group FTW. Those guys are awesome.)

35. Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most?

Katherine Heigl. My God.

36. What political issue stirred you the most?

Definitely not the MPs’ expenses scandal. I’m ashamed to report that my head was in the eighteenth century or earlier for most of this year - as it is most years. I’ll have to have a look round and see what’s happened.

37. Who did you miss?

My brother. I once had a e-brawl with an acquaintance of mine who had determined not to miss people who were far away, because what was the point, and my argument was that missing is involuntary, like an itch or a sneeze, and we can’t stare down our sneezes, yes? But now that there are so many people to miss, the missing has to be compartmentalized so that we don’t lose our minds. I don’t know if I’m happy about this, or relieved, or ashamed, but I try very hard not to miss people, and succeed in a spotty kind of way.

38. Who was the best new person you met?

I always think this is an unfair question. It puts you on the spot, and it puts the person - if there is such a person - even more on the spot. It particularly puts the people who aren’t that person on the spot. So in future: not answering this question. Also not answering it in the present. In fact, I’m determined that there’s a better meme out there somewhere.

39. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2009.

Some of the most extraordinary and wonderful of life’s experiences happen because we were backed into them, catapulted into them, dragged kicking and screaming towards them. You can prescribe a perfect life for yourself, and I can almost guarantee that it won’t make you happy. The unexpectedness, the obligation of life is what makes it three-dimensional and beautiful. Having the odd afternoon to yourself to write is an amazing thing; arranging your life so that every afternoon is given over to writing makes it exponentially less amazing. Do things that hurt you; do things that annoy you. It makes everything else feel just a bit more wonderful.

40. Quote a song lyric that sums up your year.

Wait, wait till you doubt no more
Wait till you know for sure
And you will wait too long

-Go Get Go, ‘Wait’

Happy 2010, my intrepid ones.

Till next time, &c &c.

If you follow my tweets (if you don’t, you should - I’m a riot), you’ll know that my computer has been giving me a bit of trouble in the past little while. Strange electrical noises, freezes - you know, the things you expect from a laptop that’s less than a year old. The last time it wigged out on me I had a massive Twitter Tantrum, mostly because my husband was at work and I didn’t have a second head to put to the problem (not to mention my own head isn’t so good to begin with).

Mike got home, said ‘Lessee here…’, went click-clack-boom, and the computer was behaving again. As though the problem never was. I should have been happy. Reader, I just about lost my mind.

I don’t venerate childhood or innocence nearly as much as most people, but I do remember a time when I believed that if I were grown-up enough, the learning curve would level out, that I wouldn’t feel like I was constantly scrambling towards achieving the next thing. That things would run smoothly, you know. This hasn’t been the case for a single day of my adult life.

Certain things come easily to certain people. My husband is very intuitive about technology and directions and all those things that you’re not supposed to expect a man to be good at in this enlightened day and age. He solved in five minutes a problem that had had me foaming at the mouth for nine hours. Why can’t things just be easy? I opined. Just for a day. Just for a day. Mike thought he’d done something nice for me, and was naturally bewildered at my nonsensical wailing.

I have a friend who, about a month ago, decided to give up smoking - just for a lark - and did it. No weight gain, no fever, no spots, no nothing. Just gave it up. I have another friend who has an intuitive, simple fashion sense, a beautiful face, and a body that 95% of the female population would kill for and that 95% of the straight male population would follow on hot coals from here to Brighton.

So I’m sitting here smoking with a zit on my nose wearing ever-so-becoming green fleece and wondering exactly how many doors I was slammed behind when the good stuff was being handed out.

But you only notice the stuff you can’t do, right, or the stuff that doesn’t come naturally or easily. Likewise, the natural, easy stuff is all you can see in other people. Who knows what unseen suffering there was in quitting smoking. Who knows how many hours are lost biting one’s lip, staring into the closet. And who knows what people think when they think of me. I’m an optimist, so I’m hoping that the zit on my nose isn’t high on the list.

I can write a decent sentence about just about anything. I have a good sense of rhetoric and a better sense of pitch. I have a huge pile of hair. I have massive green eyes. I have a cup size that would make your eyes go pop. I have really, really strong enamel on my teeth.

It took me two days to come up with that list. A list of things that come to me easily, that I don’t have to think about. Am I grateful for them? Not nearly enough. Some of them I actively resent.

This is my roundabout way of saying that counting one’s blessings isn’t a worthless effort. It’s important to be aware of what you’ve got. Not only to be grateful for it, but to begin to understand what other people struggle against - things that wouldn’t even occur to you. Nobody has everything, but each person has a lot.

And on my brighter days I can say this: what’s so horrible about the learning curve? If you don’t cheat it, you find new mistakes to make every day. The speed with which you pile up your mistakes is often a good gauge of how well you’re living your life. So don’t worry about being an idiot. Tot up those things that make you feel smug. Because my gorgeous friend doesn’t even know she’s gorgeous. Imagine having something that obvious to other people - that envied by other people - and not knowing you have it. Chances are, you’ve got at least one thing like that. Figure out what it is.

This moment brought to you by Hallmark. Any minute now, I’ll slip back down to regular levels of nihilism.

Till next time, &c &c.

I have a headache.

About half an hour ago my husband came downstairs while I was reading an email that was neither important nor even particularly interesting. He began to talk, and I cut him off, saying, ‘I really have to read this.’

He knows what that means, and he went back upstairs.

I call my misanthropy ‘chronic’ because it’s not always there. Sometimes I’m lonely; sometimes I’m up for a drink. But when it’s on, it’s on, and it’s not as though there are people (apart from said husband) whom I can withstand when I’m going through a misanthropic phase because they’re smart enough or nice enough. When I go through this, all the smart and nice people in my life go out the window.

I don’t, of course, bear any of them any ill-will, unless they try to contact me during one of these phases, which I do my best to announce as far in advance as possible. This has caused considerable and sometimes irreparable damage to some of my friendships. When the telephone rings, I feel like I’m being assaulted. It’s even worse than the doorbell, because usually the guy at the door is just delivering a package or asking to inspect the piping. The door guy I can ignore. The telephone’s immediate demand of recognition reduces me to cringing in a corner. It has, as I say, nothing to do with the quality of the person on the other end of the line, nor with the esteem in which I hold him or her.

Usually, though, I weather my periods of misanthropy happily enough. I say to my husband, ‘I’m going under,’ and he says ‘Right’ and silently disappears as I don my headphones. More than half the time there’s nothing coming out of the headphones: they serve merely as an insulator, an indicator that I Am Not Available. And my husband, who is part of my solitude, understands and loves me anyway. (It doesn’t hurt that he’s a bit of a misanthrope himself.)

I am lucky enough to have more than the average share of people in my life who understand this side of my character, and accept it willingly enough. (One friend, when I had a - well, I guess you’d call it a ‘misanthropic seizure’ so severe that I didn’t even go to class, slipped lecture notes under the front door of my flat.) There are others who don’t, but who are too precious to me to give up. The rest I’ve left behind, one way or another: I’m not good at casual friendships because I don’t see the point of them. Having an army of people around you just for the sake of it? No. I have a precious few, and very, very precious they are.

I suppose if Florence King were reading this she would say that I’m not really a misanthrope at all, because I have people I love fiercely - I just can’t be with them a lot of the time. I have no particular hate-on for humanity as an abstract, as eyed through a telescope - I just can’t stand crowds. And misanthropy probably isn’t the word for that, but I can’t think of a better one.

And there are days like today - be honest: weeks like this week - when the tiniest pieces of digital human excrement are enough to drive me into apoplexy. Self-righteousness; self-absorption; self-self-self when all I’m interested in is me. (Not always. Just today. Just this week.) I’m not even that interested in me, if we’re honest; sometimes I wish I would go away, too.

(You might wonder: do I think misanthropy makes for a better writer? My answer is no, no, a thousand times no. There is nothing to a novel if the interactions aren’t real ones. Without my occasional pockets of sociability, I don’t think I’d be any kind of writer at all.)

This is why I love my digital friendships and my digital presence - posting to Twitter is like dropping a coin into a well. Sometimes you hear the splash; sometimes you don’t, but it requires nothing more of you. Similarly reading tweets keeps you apprised, again, without requiring anything of you. When writing emails and letters, there’s no one on the other side of the desk looking at you, and waiting. It’s still communication, and it eliminates so much of the mess from communication. There are no awkward silences on Twitter.

Besides which, for an antisocial git I’m externally motivated to a ridiculous degree. I write to be read. I care - I really, really care, probably too much - what other people think. This machine in front of me is my way of keeping up with the world, especially at times like this, because I can’t bear the other ways.

Be patient with me, universe, while I wait for this episode to run its course. That is, of course, if you like me. If you don’t, or don’t care, feel free to ignore. (I love putting caveats at the bottom of posts. It’s my favourite.)

Till next time, &c &c.

We possess nothing certainly except the past.

Capt. Charles Ryder - Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

First of all, I’ve finally tidied up and added to my blogroll - see right; look down, waaaaay down - and it’s well worth perusal. Many, many more writing sites; many, many more insights.

And now: today’s theme: regret.

One of the more irritating vagaries of entering one’s fourth decade is one’s tendency to begin fingering the past like a rosary, to begin far too many sentences with ‘If I had the last ten years to do over again…’ I’ll say for the record that this isn’t me talking, but I have had the question put to me more times than I can be bothered with, and many of my confreres and consoeurs who’ve recently turned the dreaded three-oh are pondering the question as I write.

I’m lucky enough to be able to say with some authority that nothing really bad has ever happened to me. I’ve been sheltered by my mother, sheltered by my husband, and generally been allowed to do whatever I want. Most of the shitty things that have happened in my life are on my head and mine alone, and I’ve done most of those things as a clear-headed adult and - dare I say it - one with more intelligence than the average share. This means, really, that I ought to harbour regret. That I ought to begin my sentences with ‘If I had the last ten years to do over again…’

Rubbish, I say. Twaddle.

If I had the last ten years of my life to do over again, armed at twenty summers with the wisdom I’ve gathered about me at thirty summers, I would ascertain the following:

a) I have at least ten years to quit smoking, because it won’t have killed me by the time I turn thirty;
b) If I sit on my ass long enough, this beautiful man who deigns to spend time with me will propose marriage;
c) I have ten years! Party!

Phwah. Piss on going back to age twenty with ‘wisdom’, I say. Being twenty again would make me stupid again. Would I move on to graduate school more quickly? No. Would I earn more money? I don’t think so. Would I keep myself in shape, work to maintain the eerily cartoonish bust-waist-hip silhouette that I had when I was twenty? Absolutely not. I wasn’t exercising then; I’m not exercising now; ergo, ten years would make no difference. No: I’m far more concerned with the next ten years than the last ten.

The truth is that you have no idea what makes you who you are, what particular blend of ephemeral ingredients has turned you into the You of Right Now. And as much as I hate to admit it, I’m pretty attached to who I am now, and I’m fairly certain that who I am now has a lot more to do with what I’ve done wrong than with what I’ve done right.

Besides, Capt. Ryder is right: we possess the past. It is ours to fiddle with as we see fit. It is fungible, fixable, no one’s business but our own. If there are things I choose to omit from the official register - unless I’m filling out a landing card asking me if I have a criminal record - I am at perfect liberty to do so. Thus do we shape our lives in past, present, and future, coiling events and interactions and decisions into a narrative arc that makes sense to us and pleases us.

It’s all still there, of course: a chaotic jumble of misremembered conversations and long dark teatimes. I don’t pretend that my past is a pretty one, nor that I properly remember even as much as half of it. But it’s all there, all at work making me who I am. And the only thing about being thirty that sucks, so far, is the fact that I’m not going to be a prodigy, now. I’m not going to be a Young Something. I didn’t marry young; I won’t publish young; I won’t graduate young. I won’t be a young mother.

But as much as I try to romanticise youth, I can’t help thinking that I’m still young, and that it doesn’t especially matter: youth isn’t a character trait. Everyone has it for a while, and if they’re lucky, they won’t hang onto it. It has to go. Oscar Wilde said ‘There is nothing in the world but youth’, and Oscar Wilde had a pretty piss-poor outlook on life. I think it’s reprehensible, in a way, to fetishise youth. Trying to keep it - trying to be someone you were - stops you being the person you are. I’m content to continue accumulating a past; there is nothing in me that wants to keep a vise-grip on it.

Even acting young - hell, I didn’t do that when I was seven. I’m more apt to throw a wobbler now, to find adventure now, than I was when I was younger.

I was explaining to my husband the other night that I’m not a terribly nostalgic person. But he told me I was wrong: ‘You are,’ he said, ‘nostalgic for the time before you were born.’ And he might be right. I love living in the past - I’d be up shit creek if I didn’t, given my line of work - I’m just not interested in living in my own past.

Any thoughts from those of you reaching age milestones? What do you figure about regret? Is it useful? Should we stand in the present, Janus-faced, equally aware of our pasts and our futures, or should we look in only one direction? I’m genuinely curious to know what other people think, because I’m starting to think that my own opinions make me a bit of a loony, given my conversations with others.

Till next time, &c.

I am making a list of things that I want for, believe it or not, the first time in my life. I want a spice rack, a lovely handmade wooden one. I want a pretty tin for putting tea bags in. I want interesting and beautiful odd ceramic mugs. I want eggplant-coloured throw cushions. I want picture frames, and pictures. I want sharp black-and-white photographs of everyone I love.

I also want a Palm Pre, but those dreams can’t be quantified until Christmas, never mind realised.

The problem is that I’m nesting. I’m just now starting to enjoy existing in my own home, rather than exploiting it for its bed and its microwave. (Coming a little late to this, I know.) Some of this is a knee-jerk reaction to the uncertainty of the immediate future: I see other people’s remodelled kitchens and riding mowers - even tea that’s one step up from Twinings sitting on a table - and I start thinking of all the things I want. I can’t have any of them at this particular moment, and that’s why I want them. (Though really, I hope I still want them when I can have them, because it’s an excellent list of things to want, and I’ll miss having them if I don’t want them anymore, right.)

End Act I.

Does anyone know what happened to June? I keep expecting to see photographs of June on milk cartons and plastered up on noticeboards asking HAVE YOU SEEN THIS MONTH? I don’t know where it went. I know I did a lot of immigration faffing and a lot of tea-tin wishing but then it disappeared on me, seemingly in the first week. I didn’t post any teasers, did I? I know I did some writing; I know I did some reading. A consultation with a physiotherapist this morning tells me that I certainly got a month older. But June was sly and I didn’t see her leave.

I blame Twitter. This afternoon I felt equipped to do nothing except post to Twitter, which is what I did. If I leave it open, nothing else happens. Has anyone done a study on this? On any drop in western productivity over the past year? I know I’ve always found ways to procrastinate; the only difference now is that they’re all more or less localised in this one machine. There are too many things going on, too many things to keep up with, and no time for video games, let alone those letters I need to write, the novel I need to finish, the Portuguese I need to learn. People ask why I don’t take my computer with me when I visit archives for my research, why I take all my notes by hand: this is why. Because if I found myself at the London Metropolitan Archives with its wealth of original documents on eighteenth-century midwifery, I would sit at the London Metropolitan Archives posting to Twitter and playing Plants vs. Zombies.

And yet I want a netbook. Really, really badly. I want want want so many things.

Will this kill social media, this worldwide dearth of non-Twitter-related activity? Well, probably not. Some people use it to work, after all, not to avoid work. I follow 97 people on Twitter and try very hard to keep the number under 100 whenever possible; there are people who follow more than 1000 people, and respond to what they have to tweet, who maintain a 100-post-a-day presence on Twitter and still - maybe - manage to do other things like take the rubbish out and have the occasional sponge in the shower. (Ah, see: someone’s just posted a Cute Puppy Video.)

Sometimes I feel the need to become very military about my day and plan it down to the minute. If I allot twelve minutes per day to Twitter, on twelve different occasions throughout my waking hours, that’s only twelve minutes, right? That’s nothing. Seven minutes every two hours for Plants vs. Zombies, to defeat Dr Zomboss (that takes about seven minutes). Ten minutes of looking for flats online every morning, over my coffee (I’ve forgotten to buy sugar for about two weeks now). One hour in aggregate for catching up on email. Two hours for walking. Three minutes per half-hour for the fucking isometric exercises that I need to do at my age. The rest for working, either on research or on the novel.

If this sort of day happened organically, and there were an evening punt or a trip down the pub to round it off, I would consider it both rich and full. But it can only happen militarily, and that feels oppressive, and I think that’s how June disappeared. The time management death of a thousand cuts. And the occasional day lost to that anteroom of ‘I’ll get to that in just a minute’, when the tweets rolled in just a bit too quickly or Dr Zomboss needed more of a lesson than I could teach him in seven minutes.

I’ve posted to Twitter twice while writing this. You should see my to-do lists. They have items like ‘have breakfast’ and ‘knit coaster’ alongside the other, more important things. Military. Oppressive. It’s Twitter’s fault.

That’s it from me, for now. You have to have goals. My current goal is to post here more often. Also to remember to buy sugar. I’m going to go defeat Dr Zomboss now. Because he’s asking for it.

Till next time, if God wills it, &c &c.

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.

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.

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.