Ed Balls Ed Balls

Happy Ed Balls Day!

See, I lured you here with A Funny Premise, and now I have to try and keep you around long enough to read the post...

It's about a deadline. Much like my deadline to write this by today so I could use Ed Balls Ed Balls.

When the Sylvestus Volume I deadline was made, it seemed quite reasonable. The first draft is already completed, meaning that all that's left is... Well, all the difficult stuff, but arguably not the time-consuming part.

Then I looked at everything I actually have to do to complete that deadline, and felt my guts quail a bit inside.

If you've followed my writing before this website, you'll know that I did have a Dying Ember deadline, and that I missed it.

By about a year.

Actually it was almost exactly a year. Like, to the week of a year... Late.

Again, this was when the writing part had been done, and there was just all the difficult stuff that came after. This was a setback. It was a disheartening setback. But, Dying Ember is here and happy now, eleven months and three and a half weeks late but, you know, here. And all the better for all the extra time it got to sit around looking accusingly at the piles of A-level work (and the first draft of Sylvestus) that were happening instead.

This post isn't to apologise and change that deadline to "December 2018", I promise - the aim is still December 2017. In fact, the aim is even more December 2017 than it was before.

Because I looked at that deadline, and then I looked at Sylvestus, and then I got out a calculator and did some maths, and what I found out was that there is Lots of Work Involved and I had to go and get a chai latte and contemplate life and death and stuff for a bit. But then what I did was, I got the calculator back out, and I did more maths (amazing, I know; you wouldn't believe I got 6.5% in one of my A-level Maths exams*, all this maths that I'm doing nowadays) and I realised that actually... It's not that bad. It looks daunting because I'm not really used to deadlines in anything except seagrass assignments, and they're generally about six weeks to hand in 1300 words. Obviously you have research and formatting and referencing, but if you equate that to cover design and formatting (even worse for a book than for an essay) and nitty gritty then I figure you can cancel it out.

When I look at it like a deadline like an assignment deadline, I picture myself hyped up on coffee and concurrent panic attacks, frantically slapping any old nonsense onto the keyboard and producing something half as good as it could be if I'd taken my time and started the assignment earlier.

Effectively, the amount of work I need to do looks like this:

Without context, that's pretty meaningless.
Well, when you add a DEADLINE, it feels like this:

What if I get delayed? What if I lose inspiration and end up writing a load of [pirate novel] or Red or something totally new instead? What if it's all terrible and I have to do it again from scratch?

But then, if I look at how fast I generally work without a deadline, this is how much I normally do in exactly the same span of time:

No joke.
And that kind of writing feels like this:

So... I could take away my deadline and see if that makes it easier, because ever since I set "December 2017", when I open Sylvestus I end up kind of just

And then I can't write shit.

But I don't want to do that, because sometimes you need deadlines, and I need to learn to work with/for/around them. When I pressure a novel, it gets smaller and finickier and nastier, like a bar of soap with teeth - and Sylv is a particularly stubborn... Soap. Wow. Bad simile. This time, though, it's just going to have to learn to live with the pressure. This is less than I normally would do. It just looks scary with an end date on it.

To the best of my ability and promise, Sylvestus Volume I will be with us in December 2017.

Whether Sylv likes it or not.

After all, it's only x words a day, right?

Sylv as a bar of soap

* it wasn't dying ember or sylvestus' fault, i'm just really bad at coordinate geometry and logarithms and stuff

I'll Trade You a Memory

I'll trade you a memory.

I'm stood on the train platform. The sun is setting; I'm just in the shade, but rays of light shine down through the slats of the bridge above. Gold, yellows. It's cool enough for the air to be pale, but there's the slightest heat haze above the tracks and the light is warm. I have a baby bonsai tree cutting, in a glass jar, in my hands. He's named after a book character and in the sunlight his tiny leaves glow. There are many metaphors for the potential in a young plant, but all he does is live in the moment, and try to grow in the sunset light.

And illuminated in the yellow-gold rays of sun are... I don't remember what they're called. Seeds, maybe, attached to tiny white floatation devices. A practical and unromantic description. When I was young we called them faeries.
There must be thousands of them, floating slowly over the tracks, suspended in the warm still air and glowing in the sunlight. Everyone on the platform is quiet. Pigeons coo, and a billow of dust heralds the approaching train.

I can't get the faeries in a photo. I can't make the lens focus on the plant's leaves.
But as I stand there, I realise that I want to remember it. I want to remember this moment, this second.

There are so many moments I want to forget, tiny snapshots in time that I might be better off without, but this one I want to remember.

So I'll trade it. Give me one of your bad memories. Something you want to forget. A moment to be erased. Close your eyes and breathe it out.

And breathe in this memory:
You are on a train platform in the glowing setting sun. There is a baby bonsai plant in your hands, and thousands of faeries dance in the golden air.
Excitement buzzes low in your stomach. You are dizzy for a second with peace; the world is suddenly slow.

For one second,

Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut

"I see the boy that I shot a week later..."

 Although Each Separate Dying Ember starts with this phrase, whenever I imagine the beginning, it's always here:

This is, in case it is not clear, a hot-off-the-press illustration of... Well. That. It's described in moderate detail in the first few chapters. And the whole scene is a prominent image within the book.

As first sentences go, I'd say it's a pretty good one. Lots of ambiguity, sets the tone of the novel, gets people interested, all of that lark. And when I set out with the first draft of Dying Ember, even I didn't have all the answers to the questions it puts forward. The whole world and concept of Dying Ember came together pretty much as it was written. It meant a lot of editing afterwards, but it also made for a lot of fun at the time - and that was always the thing with this novel. It was always fun.

I tried a lot of first lines. I tried a lot of first paragraphs and first chapters. All I had to start off with was winged people in a modern city, and a lot of confused loose ideas about where to go with it from there. Gangs? Yes. Virtual reality? Probably. Gladiatorial competition? Sure.

Then this.

"I see the boy that I shot a week later."

I tried "I saw the boy that I shot a week later" and "She saw the boy that she shot a week later" (believe it or not I really don't actually like writing in first-person) and "A week later, I see him: the boy I shot" but somehow none of them fit.

And aside from logistics, what it means is important to me. Agency in this novel - the ability to make choices, to decide where they go and what they do - is an issue. You could even argue the characters' lack of agency is a theme.

But the Prelims, as we discover later, are about the intention to kill. You have to want to live, to want to escape, to be willing to take another life to make it out. Dany had to decide to pull the trigger. She may not have wanted to be in the Prelim, she may have been destined and pushed to go there, her whole life may have been staged by her place in society - but she decided, she chose, to pull the trigger.

And in a novel about free will and about agency being taken away, what better way to start than with a choice?

(also, just like. imagine that scene opening a TV adaptation or something. that's the main reason i wanted to draw it. darkness, terrified breathing, a tangle of shots of hand and face and knife and gun - and then BAM. dany, holding the gun. kiah, caught between glee and shock. the world tumbles away into pixels and embers...

cut to busy street, one week later.)

Blog Launch

W-e-l-l.

This is the... Official blog launch of Tatiana Webb, author of Each Separate Dying Ember and many other, more sarcastic and less official things.

This blog will be used for updates about books, as well as for posting art and, most likely, utterly hilarious stories and mild political shade. Only like... Positive shade, tho. Emotionally satisfying roasts of the patriarchy, kind of thing.
And more focus on the books. That... Is what this is here for.
There may be swearing. Potentially less swearing than in actual conversation with me, but no promises.

There were many other things I could talk about as an introductory post, but that would take away from potential future posts, so erm.
Here's the blog. You can like... Follow it with Google, or I think you can get emails about posts and stuff. Alternately do what I used to do when The Internet Had To Be Anonymous and Google Had No Information About Me, and just like bookmark it and check back once a week or something. Make it an event. 8pm, Thursday evenings, "check Not a Pygmy Owl for updates", recurring phone reminder. Make tea.

Desperately searching for punchlines and a way to sign off.

~Not a Pygmy Owl