Double-depodding
Aug. 18th, 2010 01:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
desperanceI? Am sitting here slipping individual broad beans from their boiled skins. Double-depodding, we call this. (And feeding the skins to Mac, as it happens, as they come; he's very good about taking food from my fingers, both boys are, it's the only occasion on which they never bite me.)
Today I have sent off the Gingersmith proposal to my agents, and the application to the place where applications go. I have also done a surprise! telephone interview with the local press, who seem suddenly to have remembered that I am in fact a novelist.
I have also remembered that I am in fact a novelist, and have - at last! - written some fiction. And am subsequently, consequently feeling kinda double-depodded myself. Raw and exposed. That's okay, though; if I were interested in self-protection, I wouldn't be in fact a novelist. All fiction (I have said this before) is an act of autobiography, an artefact of exposure; we give ourselves away with every word.
But I have a question for you, a matter of identification, genre-labelling: if it's a romance when people meet and fall in love, and a tragedy when lovers die, what is it - what do you call it - when the book's about survival, restitution, recovery?
Today I have sent off the Gingersmith proposal to my agents, and the application to the place where applications go. I have also done a surprise! telephone interview with the local press, who seem suddenly to have remembered that I am in fact a novelist.
I have also remembered that I am in fact a novelist, and have - at last! - written some fiction. And am subsequently, consequently feeling kinda double-depodded myself. Raw and exposed. That's okay, though; if I were interested in self-protection, I wouldn't be in fact a novelist. All fiction (I have said this before) is an act of autobiography, an artefact of exposure; we give ourselves away with every word.
But I have a question for you, a matter of identification, genre-labelling: if it's a romance when people meet and fall in love, and a tragedy when lovers die, what is it - what do you call it - when the book's about survival, restitution, recovery?