The Bluestocking Arms Women's Pub, where women make friends with Beetles, Androids, Cakes, Dragons, Hedgehogs and other women, where wit and wisdom flourish

[inkymoose]

Here at the Bluestocking there's a place for all women. A break from Reality, and many laughs and stories to share. Have your fill of Tunnocks bars and tea cakes, sing feminist anthems, drink as much beer or gin or hot chocolate as you desire. It won't make you fatter or drunken but oh, it's fun. Sit in the garden with our Lion resident or the Quokkas and Capybara. Express your opinions loudly in Pedantry Corner. Ask for whatever you fancy to be served by our obliging Gerbil staff. Come in, all women, welcome!

I'm always being asked if I write, because of my dad. I don't...not fiction anyway, although I did have a career in writing fact.
My son does though...it skipped a generation!

Oh, I really have found my people! I had a devastating experience with an agent for my first book, which I'm happy to share if anyone's interested. It took me a while to get the confidence back to start writing again, and I'm now a chapter away from finishing my latest one 🤗

Hail, women of the pen!

@BabyOrca I think you have to share now?! You can’t drop that tidbit and leave us hanging!!

I write too, but mine are research papers! Not quite the same thing.
Just to make @CautiousLurker01 jealous, my PhD thesis only had to be 40,000 words. Although on the flip side, I did have quite a lot of numbers too. 🤣

Quokkas get a mention in Janice Turner's Notebook today:
"Soul-soothing smilers
No arguing please, the cutest animal on the planet is the quokka. Not only an excellent Scrabble word but a sweetly gormless creature with bright, button eyes which often appears to be smiling. Google them — you’ll fall down a pleasant quokka hole.
Anyway, my intrepid friend in Australia, who travels her vast nation in a camper van, is alway trying to interest me in wildlife. She sends me pictures of kangaroos, koalas, scary stuff like spiders and crocs. Yeah, yeah, I say, but where are the quokkas?
At Easter I got a FaceTime call, to see her surrounded by quokkas. Baby ones, big ones having a half-hearted quokka skirmish. She was on Rottnest Island in Western Australia, where quokkas run amok. A friendly vegetarian marsupial, they mainly eat grass and twigs, but have grown rather fond of pastries, and there was an antidote to everything awful in this world: a quokka, politely queuing outside a bakery for a bun."

Very very envious! Mine is around 100k - 75k novel and 25k pretentious academic bit. That last bit was easy, though, just waffle on about other people’s research and theories! 🤣

@Igneococcus : thank you for posting about Janice Turner’s article. I can’t get past the paywall at the moment, so thank also you for posting a different chunk in the Woman’s Hour thread at 09:24.

A quokka waiting politely outside the bakery - how that reminds me of our gerbils.

@CautiousLurker01 and @BabyOrca - I am full of admiration for anyone who writes books. If I could wave a magic wand, and have any career I wanted, I would choose to be an author. Sadly I am terrible at creative writing. I still remember one lot of English homework, where I got a good mark, because the piece was grammatically correct, spelled properly, well constructed but dull as ditch-water, and a boy in the class got the same mark because his essay was interesting and exciting, but his spelling and grammar were poor. That has stuck with me.

Occasionally, when I can't sleep, I try to start writing my book in my head, but that's as far as it goes. So I will hover on the edge of InkPenCorner, and gaze admiringly at the real writers.

I know, a queue consisting of polite quokkas or gerbils is just too adorable.
Here is a sharetoken for the article, anytime anyone needs a sharetoken for any Times article just give me a shout:
https://www.thetimes.com/article/36ea1e14-f930-4725-a881-c777f7470887?shareToken=0bc77384c40cea37783adae7207eae19

Very generous, @Igneococcus , thank you.

@CautiousLurker01
Well, here's an abridged version of my favourite rant! I got several offers of rep for my first book, and decided to go against my gut and sign with the top-selling agent. The initial plan was to make a few edits, and take the book to LBF a few months later. That then turned into her having me rewrite the entire story: a process that took TWO years, as with each fresh round, she wanted more changes. After an in-person meet-up in London (which involved me stalking the streets of Soho until she gave me a location half an hour before we were meant to meet and then proceeded to treat me like I had shat on her plate), I ended up 'going over her head' and was promptly dumped the next day.
Armed with a newfound sense of self-doubt, I spent a year being depressed, wrote a second book that got some full requests but no bites, and now I'm planning on going global with this third book, naturally. All joking aside, having been told the second was 'hard to position', for this new book I decided to write a psychological thriller with literary undertones, set in a major crowd-pleasing city. If that fucker doesn't do it, I don't know what will! I've got 50K words which obviously isn't enough, but this time around I decided to 'feel my way' through the story rather than meticulously plot ahead of time, so now I'll be going back over it and fleshing stuff out.

I agree with the comments above, for me the vast majority of the time I spend on a novel seems to go into the 'thinking it through', otherwise known as 'dicking around'. I'm quite a fast writer but it takes me about nine months or so to properly get my finger out and start banging through some chapters.

OMG @BabyOrca have to say I am not surprised. I have heard some bloody awful horror stories about agents and live in fear of ever actually finding one - am going to the jericho writers thing in a few months and may risk pitching to one or two agents there but I always come back deflated so haven’t done it for a few years. I’ve got a series that’s sprouted out of the novel I started for my MA which my then tutor (half of an award winning crime writing name) said was very publishable/marketable but am too scared to pitch it in case I come home from the event ready to just give up!

Has writing the second/third novels become easier? This one form y PhD will be the first I’ve actually finished (if I get there) and I am really hoping that exploring the process and finding the way that works for me will mean I can knock out a novel a yearish after that (if I have any hope of making that series come to fruition)… or am I deluding myself?

My PhD thesis is about 3 inches thick, but more than half of that is computer printout data tables and there’s loads of other tables and figures. It came in quite handy when I needed to raise the height of an old heavy computer monitor.

@CautiousLurker01
Wow, that's fantastic! You're writing a novel AND doing a PhD? What genre is your book, would you say?

It was invaluable, spending those two soul-destroying years reworking the first book with the agent: it was essentially like an epic masterclass where I learnt to seriously self-edit. On the down side, that "editorial voice" in my head has maybe hampered my ability to write as freely as I did back when I wrote that first manuscript. Looking at the current "draft zero" for this next book, I want to go back and rework the chapters, padding them out but also adding a little more personality.

It's definitely become easier in the sense that you know you've done in once, so there's nothing stopping you doing it again. You "know the drill". Still haven't quite mastered the art of ruthless self-discipline though, which is one of the biggest barriers IMO!

Yes - writing the novel as part of the PhD (it’s a Phd through practice or something). My area is feminist perspectives of crime fiction.

The MA main thesis was on the female detective and how, they are really just adaptations of the flawed male detective and rather misogynistic. I interviewed Ann Cleeves and Terri Gerritsen as both were so lovely with their time, and wrote the first quarter of a novel featuring a female detective informed by my research. I have plans for a series as my fem detective is a single mum and her back story will shape the 2nd and 3rd novels through her relationship with her daughter.

For my PhD I am looking at the depiction of mothers in crime fiction, focusing on domestic noir so my novel is in that vein and explores mothers/maternal blame. The thesis looks at the way male inadequacy and psychopathy is always explained in fiction as being the wife/mother’s fault, so flawed detectives and psychopaths always have alcoholic, avoidant, absent, or just generally aberrant mothers… so it’s never the bloke’s fault he’s an arse. It’s become a literary shorthand within crime fiction and I am pushing back on the idea because, I posit, this is lazy writing and that there are a million reasons why a detective could be useless or a man develops into a psycho. Writers are too lazy to bother creating an alternative explanation.

It offends me because 65-70% of the readers/purchasers of crime fiction globally is middle aged, middle class (white) women who are absorbing this narrative and passively endorsing it by continuing to read it. The hope of the project is to highlight this and, maybe, ask agents and publisher alike to start pushing back when they see this narrative in manuscripts. I’d love for them to tell their clients to go and come up with drivers for male failure and dysfunction that don’t rely on the women in their lives…

As you can see, I kind of love this stuff.

I mean.... I've not written a novel or anything, but I'll just leave this screen shot here from November 2023
👇

The thesis looks at the way male inadequacy and psychopathy is always explained in fiction as being the wife/mother’s fault, so flawed detectives and psychopaths always have alcoholic, avoidant, absent, or just generally aberrant mothers… so it’s never the bloke’s fault he’s an arse.

That sounds something I’d like to read when it’s ready. Generally, is there online access to published doctoral theses at your institution? I am a member of a university library which means I can read all their digitally published things from home, I think, but I don’t know if there’s a national network. If theses beyond ones from my university have to be read only in their library I can go there to do it.

@CautiousLurker01 that sounds fascinating and like @AsWithGlad I would love to read your thesis once you're done.
Also had no idea that a PhD through practice was a thing so thank you very much for setting me off down that rabbit hole!

The place I did my PhD is FULL of monitors propped up on discarded MSc and PhD theses!

That's a fascinating topic, Cautious.

I don't read crime fiction but I recognise the 'my mother made me a murderer' trope from seeing the title of a true-crime series on one of those TV channels up the other end of the cable offer from the serious channels- not as far as the MTV and the channel that has the Rosary a lot, but quite far up
I can't remember the exact title, but it was something very close to 'My Mother Made Me a Murderer'. Unsubtle, or what?

The old punchline 'If I gave her the wool would she make one for me too' suggested itself
A woman's place is in the wrong, eh?

Love the title of your collections! I can’t write poetry for toffee but I always loved the work of Maya Angelou, which was political and protest poetry of a sort, wasn’t it?

@CautiousLurker01 - your PhD sounds fascinating - I am a huge fan of detective fiction, and Ann Cleeves is one of my all-time favourite writers, so I am green with jealousy that you have interviewed her!

Have you read any of JD Robb’s novels - the In Death series? I think she writes female characters well.

I love the books of Elly Griffiths and Stephanie Austin for gore-less crime with strong female MCs.

Not read J D Robb (well, I might have read the first few back in the 90’s … but she [Nora Roberts!] has written 61! FFS how can anyone write that many books??? That’s 2 a year!!

Am going to try book 1 tonight though as the ticktock sensation/YA fantasy I was trying for a change is totally pants.

And yes, Anne Cleeve was an absolute darling. She is exactly the kind and gentle person you see in her telly interviews. Actually all the crime writers I’ve met have been pretty lovely… Linda La Plant was a little bit too much for me, though. Not enough room for both her and her ego in most settings, but I think you’d have to be a ‘strong’ character to excel in TV back when she was there.

Will look up Ellie Griffiths now too! I feel a vat of hot chocolate and a curl up with a new book is definitely called for tonight.

There is a national repository in theory. The British Library's EThOS database held the vast majority of electronically published theses, but it was collateral damage when the British Library got hit by a massive DDOS attack, and it's taking a while for them to recover. There's always a delay between publication and them going online, even when it is working.