Friends, I have a dilemma. I'm currently reading Christopher Hale's Massacre in Malaya: Exposing Britain's My Lai as part of the research towards Monsoon Season. It's a very compelling book. I haven't yet got to the part about the Batang Kali Massacre (to which the title refers) but my inter-library loan copy is already feathered with post-it notes. I am very keen to see how his argument … [Read more...]
On re-reading
Hello, friends. One morning last week, as I was still waking up, I had a moment of intense clarity about my work-in-progress: its shape is wrong. I need to restructure the first third of the novel. As I'm less than halfway through a first draft, I did not welcome this insight. Indeed, I spent a couple of days squinting at the corpus-thus-far-assembled, giving it a poke here and a jab there, as … [Read more...]
A(nother) fresh start
Hello, friends. It's been a while since I talked about my work-in-progress, and that's no accident. I have been tussling with Monsoon Season, aka the Next Book, for ages now. I'm almost ashamed to say how long, but there's no point in being coy: I first started it about 18 months ago. Then I scrapped what I had, and re-started it. Then I junked the second version and began afresh. And guess what? … [Read more...]
Nostalgia and serendipity
Hello, friends. I spent yesterday morning very happily shuttling around libraries. The first was Stauffer Library, the humanities and social sciences library at the university where I did my PhD. You could say I know my way around it. For a few years, it was as familiar to me as my own apartment. I had the positions of the stacks memorized; I knew which photocopiers worked best; I was on … [Read more...]
Code Name: Verity
So, Code Name: Verity. It was first published in 2012. It was shortlisted for both the Printz Award and the Carnegie Medal, so it's not as though I'm drawing attention to unsung heroines, here. But I finally made time to read Elizabeth Wein's novel last week and when I'd finally finished sobbing, all I could wonder is why I'd let it languish for two years. As you may already know, Code Name: … [Read more...]
What is a novel?
Hello, friends. I recently had a long and utterly engaging conversation with three fellow writers: two of them critically acclaimed poets, all of us writers of novels. We were talking about the act of writing. One of us, who is working on her first novel, said that for her, writing it was like posing the question, "What is a novel?" That is, what are the novelistic conventions I value? Is it true … [Read more...]