Being Small
Oct. 28th, 2013 04:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
desperanceHere's a curious thing, a thing of many facets:
It is a book, and I am reading it.
It is a book, and I wrote it.
It has also been my life, and I have lived it.
It has also been another aspect of my life, and I lived that too.
It is also a life that I never lived, that I made up entirely, because I'm like that; but even the made-up stuff says a lot more about me than I'm entirely comfortable with, and some people will think that some of it is true. And of course they'll be right, because even when we work from whole cloth, that is the whole cloth of our lives. I've said it before - indeed, it's one of my best quotes - that any act of fiction is an act of autobiography, that we give ourselves away with every line. Just because it's clever doesn't make it untrue.
Anyway. Having written what appears to be a confessional novel, apparently I need to write a confessional blog post about it. It's all about me, see.
Which was in fact the thing I'd most forgotten. I wrote this book some while back, and it's spent most of the intervening time on the shelf, not actively in my head. The bits I best remember are the bits I most made up; much of the rest of it - well. I've transposed cities and decades willy-nilly, and even so. I guess you had to be there, but I was; and reading the book through, I keep tripping over myself. It's very odd.
I spent all my childhood and adolescence in Oxford, and this is very much a book about that. I spent the formative year of my adulthood helping to care for a dying friend when he wouldn't go back into hospital, so a bunch of us worked to make sure he didn't have to; it's very much a book about that too. It's also a book about the dead twin I never had and the neuroatypical mother ditto ditto - but even so, the other thing I do keep tripping over? Is that this is not a genre novel. I'd forgotten that too. I've written about Quin's dying a dozen times or more, and those have been ghost stories and crime stories and gay erotica, because that's what I do - and this isn't. I don't claim it to be literature, and it is certainly mainstream fiction with a genre sensibility - but even so. This is straightfic, if ever I went there.
And it's called Being Small. and it'll be out from Per Aspera sometime in the next year or so; and I should probably get back to reading it so's I can talk about it sensibly with my editor at WFC this weekend.
As the date gets closer, though, I might start posting darlings; because I keep tripping over those too. I said, I'm here as a reader right now. Not responsible. Nothing to blush for.
It is a book, and I am reading it.
It is a book, and I wrote it.
It has also been my life, and I have lived it.
It has also been another aspect of my life, and I lived that too.
It is also a life that I never lived, that I made up entirely, because I'm like that; but even the made-up stuff says a lot more about me than I'm entirely comfortable with, and some people will think that some of it is true. And of course they'll be right, because even when we work from whole cloth, that is the whole cloth of our lives. I've said it before - indeed, it's one of my best quotes - that any act of fiction is an act of autobiography, that we give ourselves away with every line. Just because it's clever doesn't make it untrue.
Anyway. Having written what appears to be a confessional novel, apparently I need to write a confessional blog post about it. It's all about me, see.
Which was in fact the thing I'd most forgotten. I wrote this book some while back, and it's spent most of the intervening time on the shelf, not actively in my head. The bits I best remember are the bits I most made up; much of the rest of it - well. I've transposed cities and decades willy-nilly, and even so. I guess you had to be there, but I was; and reading the book through, I keep tripping over myself. It's very odd.
I spent all my childhood and adolescence in Oxford, and this is very much a book about that. I spent the formative year of my adulthood helping to care for a dying friend when he wouldn't go back into hospital, so a bunch of us worked to make sure he didn't have to; it's very much a book about that too. It's also a book about the dead twin I never had and the neuroatypical mother ditto ditto - but even so, the other thing I do keep tripping over? Is that this is not a genre novel. I'd forgotten that too. I've written about Quin's dying a dozen times or more, and those have been ghost stories and crime stories and gay erotica, because that's what I do - and this isn't. I don't claim it to be literature, and it is certainly mainstream fiction with a genre sensibility - but even so. This is straightfic, if ever I went there.
And it's called Being Small. and it'll be out from Per Aspera sometime in the next year or so; and I should probably get back to reading it so's I can talk about it sensibly with my editor at WFC this weekend.
As the date gets closer, though, I might start posting darlings; because I keep tripping over those too. I said, I'm here as a reader right now. Not responsible. Nothing to blush for.