Editing. Still.

I refuse to get into the habit of starting every blog post with an apology for not blogging more, because that way madness lies... but, er, well. Sorry. I should blog more. I suck.

Basically, this is because I'm still editing. And the editing is weighing so heavily on me that if I do anything else I feel guilty. Including blogging. Right now, though, I'm on my lunch hour (ha! who'm I trying to kid? my lunch hours) and facebook was looking boring and googling myself wasn't fruitful and the BBC iPlayer wasn't showing anyth-- wait, I'm giving away far too much, here. I am a hard-working writer, honest.

Anyway, here we go. Hello. Long time no see... :)

I was hoping to get a new draft of Edward Leigh to my agent last week, for the 1st of February. I did actually think I could do that, right up until the 30th or so of January, when it dawned on me that I'd only got halfway through and most of the work is in the second half. I've never missed a writing deadline before, and it came as a bit of a shock. The thing is, I thought I had it sorted. In January I'd sat down and more or less told myself what I needed to do, scenes I needed to add or delete and so on. Then all I had to do was just implement my notes and All Would Be Well.

Did you spot the deliberate mistake? Yes, it was the "more or less".

So there are a few problems with that rosy idea of editing. Firstly, edits, like a novel, are only meaningful once you've written them. They will always work in theory. It's only when you're writing them that you realise that there's a glitch or a bug or whatever. (In my case, MAJOR PLOT POINTS which have been ENTIRELY FORGOTTEN. Oops.) And secondly, "just adding or deleting scenes" is like saying "just writing a novel". Today I've written more than a thousand words from scratch, which in a first draft situation would be a good day's work. But according to my (and I do not want to admit that it's even slightly optimistic) schedule, I have another fifty pages to get through this afternoon. And another hundred tomorrow. Wish me luck.

It's like toothpaste. You look at the nearly empty tube and think, oh, not much there, better buy some more. But then, as you squeeze, the toothpaste builds up until by the time you've rolled the tube up halfway you realise there's a bloody sight more toothpaste than you'd bargained for. (OK, so that metaphor would work better if toothpaste was more of a burdensome, negative thing. Probably not many people find out they've got more toothpaste than they realised and feel utterly daunted and overwhelmed. Although if you do, let me say that I know exactly how you feel, because toothpaste - well, it can be so like editing...)  

Or rather it's like a machine. You think it's just a question of changing a few cogs and then you realise that a) now the whole balance of the thing has gone and there's a lot more recalibration to do and b) it's still not going to work after that and you don't know why.

Sigh.

Actually, I think it is advancing. I might get it done by next week. I really hope so, because I'm dying to do some reading and writing and fiddling and thinking and you know, writerly stuff*, without feeling guilty. Then again - anyone else find themselves editing and gradually starting to think, hang on, I think I'm making this worse? Those moments when there wasn't enough of a particular character, so you take them out entirely, or you suddenly realise you've cut the very part your agent liked so much, or... wait, this is getting too depressing. Enough - if you know what I mean you know what I mean.

On the plus side, it will be finished one day. I hope. And then we will look back and laugh. Ho ho.

And The Broken Road came out this week - hurrah! - and has already had a lovely review on bookbag.

And the salt and pepper pots are safely back at King's College.** (I assume. I didn't phone to ask.)

You lose some, you win some.


* AKA sleeping.
** Although sorry, Elin, those Maltesers may never return to their rightful home...

Fanfiction, slash, and the Female Gaze

I'm taking a pause in the middle of Mazecheat edits, which are slow, boring work (mainly adding in technical/plot points so that the end actually works - which is complicated, requires close reading and is highly unrewarding). And it's lunchtime and there's nothing on BBC iPlayer I feel like watching, so...

...so I thought I would write this.

I've been meaning to write about fanfiction/slash fiction for a while - ever since, in fact, I read one of the first ever online reviews of The Traitor Game, which said: "the one thing I'm curious about is whether B R Collins cut her writing teeth online, as there are elements in it which are closer to fanfiction than to professional fiction - and this is in no way a criticism!" Later she added that it was "something to do with the quality of the emotions. Like I said - definitely NOT a crit!"

Ri-ight, I thought.

I didn't get it at all. I knew nothing about fanfic at that point - and when I looked at some it still didn't make sense. Fanfic, I thought, is when a writer takes SOMEONE ELSE'S CHARACTERS and SOMEONE ELSE'S WORLD and writes their own story about them and it. (Those caps aren't emotional, by the way, they're supposed to imply a kind of slightly bemused emphasis. Imagine me talking to myself in a very slow and confused sort of way.) So if you're writing with your OWN characters and your OWN world... er... well - fic possibly, but where does the fan bit come in? (Unless you're your own fan, of course, which I suppose, in my case, possibly... but that's presumably not quite what she was driving at. She'd never met me, after all.)

It bugged me. Because deep down - and the more I read fanfic, the stronger it was - I had a conviction that she was on to something. And that felt... weird. As if I'd revealed more of myself than I meant to.

And I kept reading. I read lots and lots of fanfiction, most of it slash fiction. And slowly, slowly it started to dawn on me. She wasn't really talking about fanfiction in general. No, she was talking about slash. Slash is - and I'm mainly talking about M/M slash, just so you know - a form, or let's say a subspecies, or maybe a kind of daughter-species, of fanfiction. But here's the crucial thing: 'original' slash can (and does) exist, when 'original' fanfic (presumably) doesn't.

For anyone who isn't familiar with slash, let me give you the basic rundown. Slash fiction is (generally, see above) fanfiction which involves a non-canonical pairing of two (generally) male characters. It is (generally*) written by women for women. And most of them (generally**) are straight or bi. I.e., they find their male characters sexually attractive.

(For more details, plus endless, endlessly enticing links - this time I got distracted through here and here to, er, here - go to TVTropes. Actually The Traitor Game has its own TVTropes entry, where the troper has obligingly joined in on this debate...)

So what's the difference between slash fiction and gay fiction? Surely gay men (for example) writing about gay men will have the same basic approach? And they don't get labelled slash, do they? (And whether or not you think "slashy" is pejorative, it's certainly more marginalising and easily dismissible than "gay".) I'm happy to acknowledge slash as a genre, but I'm not prepared to define it simply by the gender of the author (M/M fiction by woman = slash, by man = gay). No. So what is it about? The believability of the Ms as Ms? The transparency (or otherwise) of the convention that these are, actually, Fs, rewritten and encoded in order to explore something about them in the real world?

Anthony McGowan (great YA writer and altogether Good Thing) once said to me that he was astonished at how male he thought the characters in The Traitor Game were. And it was one of the nicest compliments I've ever had. (My mother, on the other hand, told me they were far too female. I like to think that Tony knows more about male experience than my mother... but you never know.) I really wanted TTG to be authentic; I didn't want the characters to be some female fantasy of adolescent boys. (There's a place for that... but possibly only in my head.) And I do think, truly, that I succeeded. "Gay", then, rather than "slash"?

And yet... it is a bit slashy. I mean... What was it the review said? "Something in the quality of the emotion"? Well. There's a lot of sexual attraction. There's a lot of boys looking at each other. There's a fair amount of sublimated eroticism which focuses on eyes and hands and voice, rather than - well, breasts or arses or cocks or... Maybe there really is something in the quality of the gaze, not just its object, which can imply or subvert the gender of the gazer. Maybe there's something female in how you look, not just who you're looking at. Maybe the implied gender of the gazer is more important, in the end, than the gender of the gazee.

But no. I don't like that conclusion, and I don't trust it, either. My gut tells me that fancying someone is fancying someone. Sexual attraction is sexual attraction. Men don't automatically fall for big tits, any more than women fall for a lovely personality. The Female Gaze, as Our Friend TVTropes says, 'may overlap with Homosexual Male Gaze'. Think we're back where we started.

And yet... and yet...

I am playing around at the moment with a slash novel. Yes, deliberately slashy, deliberately self-indulgent - not one for the publishers, more to remind myself of the onanistic pleasure of writing, to drive away the I-must-make-a-living-demons that prey on creativity. I started it yesterday. It's from a male character's POV, and on the first page I reread the sentence: "Behind him there was a young man - his own age, but taller, with a clear, cold look in his eyes, as though the mountain air had got between his irises and the outside world."

Bingo, I thought. That is so slashy.

And I don't even know why.



*OK, I'm going to stop doing this now. You get the idea.
** No, I'm sorry, I can't.

One of the nicer things this week...

Good reviews are nice. They really are. It's lovely to have someone be nice about your books, especially when it's someone brilliant (coughMalPeetcough) in a national newspaper... You can quote them on the cover and everything. It's great. I've been lucky with reviews, on the whole, and I'll always be grateful.

But a few days ago I came across something on the Internet that gave me more pure, lasting, disinterested pleasure than a review ever has.

Fanfiction.

The Traitor Game has not one but at least two people writing fanfic. Possibly even more. I can't express how delighted I was - am - to have found that out. It feels like such a privilege. Is that crazy? I had to restrain myself, with difficulty, from commenting. (I was only going to thank them and say I thought it was really cool, but all the same I decided not to, because I don't want them to feel I'm looking over their shoulders, or that I imagine I have some kind of right over what they write. The same goes for positive Internet reviews, as it happens. Every so often I can't resist, but in general I feel that the author should keep in the background, so that people can say what they want without it getting personal.) But I was just... so pleased.

Fanfic is a weird thing. I've never written it; I only really heard of it after I wrote The Traitor Game, because someone wondered whether I'd been influenced by slash...* Fanfic is subversive, in a way; there are stories about authors and producers getting antsy about other people writing about "their" characters. But as long as no one's making money out of it, I don't understand the problem. And yes, I used those quotation marks advisedly. Michael and Francis aren't really "my" characters: any more than - oh, I dunno, let's say Takeo and Shigeru, or Fitz and the Fool, or (and I've read a really good piece of slash about these two) Sparrowhawk and Jasper aren't "mine". I'm a reader: those characters live in my head, independently of their authors. And they go on living. That's what reading is. I've never written fanfic, but I recognise that experience - you read a book, you love the characters, and you rewrite them again and again, you get to know them, you live their lives... That's normal, isn't it? And it's a huge compliment to the author. I'm amazed and thrilled that people care enough about Michael and Francis, that they want them to go on living, that they want them to have a happy ending.

So thank you, whoever you are. I'd give you my blessing if it didn't sound patronising. Hope people go to read your stuff here. And here.

And yes, I always thought Michael and Francis would get together eventually too.

*This is an interesting question, and one which I fully intend to muse on at more length. But not now.