Longhand v. Keyboard

Working on this Tudor novel, which is longer than anything I've written since an unpublished psychological thriller I grew, almost under laboratory conditions, in the early noughties, I've been returning to earlier ways of generating inspiration.

In other words, I've started writing new sections longhand, and then transferring them to the computer later in the day. I also rather cunningly expand and revise as I type up, so that 500 words by hand develops into 1000 on screen.

This seems an ideal solution to keeping up the daily word count, which does feel inexorable at times, especially since I occasionally become inexplicably blocked at the sight of my laptop. Association of object with activity.

It just seems nice and undemanding, kind of old-fashioned, writing a few carefully-chosen words by hand into a notebook. Those then grow, line by line, into paragraphs, and then pages ...

I couldn't write the whole book like this, of course. It would probably kill me, and take over a year to do so. Let's face it, I can type much faster than I can write longhand. Legibly, at least. But when it's cold and damp outside, as it is today, and I can curl up on the sofa with a notebook and ink pen, there's a Virginia Woolf feel to the process of writing a novel.

Shh, if you listen carefully, you can hear the birds singing in Greek.

Still Playing Catch-Up

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Okay, here it is - this week's TO DO list:

• Prepare books etc. for the reading/book selling gig I'm doing this Wednesday evening at Warwick Library - roughly 7pm, if you're in the area.
  
• Revise 'on screen' the large sheaf of poems I've been editing by hand in cafes and in bed since the start of last week. I find it hard to actually edit on screen, but still like to see the work as it might appear printed, so prefer to work by hand on hard copies of my poems and then type up the revisions to study the finished product. Sometimes the revisions work and sometimes they don't, which is when the whole process begins again.
  
• Keep working at my latest poem - now roughly two pages long, scribbled in pencil in my favourite black moleskin notebook, with much feverish crossing-out and many alternate versions circled or pointed to with arrows.
  
• Continue 'translating' the various extracts from Homer's Iliad in my Greek anthology - with the help of copious notes for the weak linguist, of course. Having spent the better part of the last two years studying Classical Greek, it would be a shame not to keep working at my Greek now the course has finished - even if only for a few desultory hours a week.
  
• Update my Warwick Laureate blog: it's been several weeks since my last confession and I don't want people to think I've died!
• Make a definite date in my iCal to touch base with my fantasy novel again, now about a third of the way through. It seems to be a recurring pattern that I work on it for about three months of the year - one month in the summer, and two months in the winter, usually around the Christmas holidays. I'm not sure why that is, except possibly that a novel always feels like it needs a longer 'run' than writing poetry, and those times of the year are more conducive to being set aside for long-term projects like that. If I had an agent begging for the book, of course, I would throw everything else aside and finish it. Instead my immediate priority has to be poetry, even though it doesn't pay as well as a novel, because I know I can place my poetry and it won't just get sent from publisher to publisher for the next few years. I've written three unpublished novels over the past ten years, and there are few things more depressing for a writer than having lovingly written and polished something that never sees a book shelf.
• Write up some notes I've made on a friend's poems and send them to him, before he also thinks I've died!
  
• Prepare a blog entry on my trip to the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival. It's been several weeks since I came back from the east coast, weighed down with new books of poetry and criticism, and I still haven't blogged about my adventures there. Bad Jane.
  
• Finish the chocolate truffles left over from my birthday on Saturday. That has to be my favourite job on the list - definitely one to do today!
  

Ancient Greek Examination this week

Yes, the time has come to put away my Ancient Greek books and face the dreaded examination. It's on Wednesday morning and will be three hours long. It's my second Greek exam, being the finale of my second year of Greek with the Open University, and this year consists of prepared passages from Plato's Symposium (for comprehension and essays), an unseen translation, and the most appalling thing anyone doing this subject could ever imagine: a dastardly Ancient Greek grammar section, which should take about 45 minutes to complete.

You'll forgive me, then, if this post is a little short, but I have only a day and a half left for revision, and still haven't covered the Middle and Passive, nor have I even so much as glanced at noun declensions.

Silent scream!

N.B. For those interested in such things, here's a link to my rather irregular blog on studying Ancient Greek.