I’m sick again. I think it’s the same thing as before. Sore throat, sinuses, bastard of a stomach ache, fever. Fucking tropics. I want a gin and tonic to disinfect my insides, but we only have awful Thai rum, and I can’t face drinking that.

I’ve been running around doing the stuff that always seems to have to be done before going overseas. Today was going to be a work day, but instead it’s been a “play with Wacom to distract from physical misery” day.

ETA: …Right, so, somehow bread with olive oil was a cure? O.o ..

I made a little Pan… I think he’s sweet and I should finish him:

I will get Tea Master finished. It will work. I can make it work. I have the power.

Just giving myself a pep talk!

It’s 30,000 words now, without the end. That means this draft is likely to hit 40,000 after all.

It needs a lot of work still. Not so much in terms of plot, but how the plot is presented — who says what to whom, and when, and how I juggle POV.

And characterisation. Usually that’s the one thing I don’t have to worry about. My characters tend to write themselves. If they don’t, the story, if it gets off the ground at all, doesn’t land. But I’ve had to push characters around in this and decide things for them. Now they have to get comfortable in their roles, and I have to get comfortable with them in those roles, and they and I have to work on presentation — conversation, interior dialogue, mood.

There are also scenes that half belong to older drafts that I haven’t rewritten much, if at all, because there’ll be no point doing that until I’ve got some other things sorted out.

I pulled out (for the 3rd or 4th time!) the plot element that I thought I was finally going to leave in. It was working in some ways, but not in others. It’s one story with it and a different story without it, for one of the characters; it doesn’t significantly change the story as a whole. It needs a supporting bit to hold it up, which I thought turned out to be quite a cool thing in itself, and added to the story — but it (the main thing, not the support) also brought logistic problems and made characterisation harder. I’m still not sure what I’ll do about it. (ETA: I may just have worked out a way around the logistic problem. Or not. Maybe there’s a catch…)

I so wanted to have this finished by now, and honestly, it’s still not that close. And I’m feeling tired. I probably need a breather, but don’t really want to take one. I want to be sitting and writing and feeling things clicking into place as I write. I’m bloodymindedly sure that they will click, because I refuse to have put this much effort into something that isn’t going to work. And there are parts of it that I love, and parts of it that are fine. There are just a couple of biggish locks to pick, as it were.

In the meantime, I am going to have a break, because we’re off to Ireland next week. Although I’ll be taking the laptop and probably doing some work, I hate writing on that tiny screen. I can’t see the little itty bitty words, when I make the font bigger I can’t see enough of the story (having finally got a proper monitor I can’t believe I went for years without one), and I’m not that good at working in a room where I’m not on my own. So I’m not expecting to get vast amounts done. What I’ll probably do is reread, make notes, think, move things around, get a better sense for what’s lacking and what’s overdone, and only do serious rewriting if inspired.

What I will do, between now and then, is properly write the end, or an end. It’s partly written; it just needs some steady jogging-pace writing to make it more of a finished product. I’ve got time to do it, and you never know, the end might help with the middle!

Nobel laureate V.S. Naipaul has got himself into the papers lately with a put-down — not his first — of female authors.

I don’t know if it’s worth taking time out of my day to write down my thoughts about this. Probably not, though I’ve done it now. This is a good response from writer Christophee Wunderlee.

I haven’t read any of Naipaul’s work — yeah, I know, he’s one of those writers you’re meant to read, but I haven’t. And now I won’t. I’m not interested in what someone with a mind like that might have to say about the human condition, the world at large, or, indeed, so much as how to fry an egg. Defective. Out with the trash. I’d rather read Twilight.

All the same, when a writer of Naipaul’s stature makes statements like that — ill-informed, one-eyed, and nonsensical ( “inevitably for a woman, she is not a complete master of a house, so that comes over in her writing”…?? … Jane Austen is sentimental ..??? ) — is it enough just to laugh and shrug at a silly old fool?

When a commentator, even if only in the Telegraph, writes something as gormless as “Naipaul’s putting down of potential rivals and extravagant praising of himself was fully in keeping with a literary tradition that goes back to the time of Shakespeare and Marlowe. The self-regard of an author is to be expected.” — does one just chuckle and say, “Oh, those men, they’re at it again — and let’s forgive Polanski while we’re at it — because men’s genius, and men’s egos, are more precious than anything?” If a woman is not a complete master, of a house or anything else, and it happens to come over in her writing, is that any worse than the egoism of a man who feels he is master of the fucking universe showing through in his writing?

I hope no woman reading Naipaul’s words feels discouraged from doing her best and being her greatest (or from taking up space and time with her words at all!), or gets the idea that “greatest” means “most like famous and successful men” — or, on the other hand, that “her greatest” can only mean greatest on a small scale; that she should never attempt a big, bold project about nations and the sweep of history, because they are reserved for men. And I hope no man reading them feels his dick get bigger.

Yesterday I wrote 3000 words, which is a lot for me. It’s a part of Tea Master that I had only written a skimpy, really crap draft of. I put it in first person in this draft and the character talked my ear off! It’ll need redrafting, but the basics are there. Finding a garrulous character is like hitting a vein of gold.

Since I wrote so much yesterday I feel like I don’t have to write at all today. I can catch up on email and do a bit of extra planning for the Ireland/UK trip and restore myself after last night’s party at the studio, from which I returned at 1 am, intending to sleep till 8 or so — but I was woken up by some person next door playing video games at 6:30, chiz.

Also, Pan and Gary are off to the foundry. I should be getting hard wax models that I can then play more with if I want to. The tips of Pan’s horns broke off, so I had to fix them with superglue, then patch them a bit with soft wax-clay – and I can’t see if I’ve done a good enough job, but I should be able to see when he’s all in one material — at the moment he’s three different colours. One ear broke, too, and I ended up making a new one. I’m not so thrilled with that plastilina stuff now — it cracks, at least the hard one does.

I also had to fill in some spaces around Pan’s ears to help prevent them getting snapped off at the hard wax stage. As I understand it, if he were bigger it wouldn’t be such a problem. Much as I like the idea of having small pieces to hopefully sell, it’s very fiddly to work at that scale — and as I’m learning you also have issues with the fragility of small protuberant bits. You can cast them separately and weld them on — but all in all I think I’d rather try working larger, so I’m going with my teacher’s idea to do a full-figure Pan. I think I’ll make him about 2 feet high — big enough to put in a garden! I’ve got ideas for two different Pans — one for a youthful, lissome version, and a more conceptual one for a mature Pan a la The Wind in the Willows.

Which means legs — thinking about the arrangement of those goat legs so that they work visually from all angles. And it means scultping a male torso and getting it right. Which means spending some time in London making drawings of classical sculpture as a start.