'My heavenly favourite, I'll come straight out with it: I should have taken a paring knife and incised you like a sore in a claw horn...'

These are the opening lines of the novel I discuss below. They give a good sense of the novel. Possibly it is brilliant. It is also disturbing.

Welcome to Issue 8 of the 2PoundPaperback – it's an extra-length one today. Re the experiment in the last issue, I'm trying out a new format. This issue includes only the 'reading,' 'writing,' and 'question sections,' but expands the first two.

Reading:

My Heavenly Favourite by Lucas Rijneveld (translated by Michelle Hutchinson).

This is a novel where a middle-aged farm veterinarian addresses the teenage victim of his sexual abuse.

It is graphic. Much more so than the obvious comparison, which is Lolita. If I remember right, Lolita only has one real sex scene in it. There are probably several reasons for that, but one of them is presumably that Nabokov wanted to avoid gratuitousness in order to maintain the seriousness of the novel's philosophical enquiry.

That is what I've been trying to decide about My Heavenly Favourite, whether it's gratuitous for the sake of shock-value, or whether this is in service of something else. A view I've heard several times, is that it is harder and harder to be taboo in contemporary society, and so one way of looking at this, is that Rijneveld is proving to us that there are indeed still taboos.

I normally have a strong-ish stomach but I have to admit – all the technical skill of My Heavenly Favourite aside – I'm finding it too disturbing and have stopped about halfway.

I decided I needed something easy to read instead, and so I picked up the crime thriller Anna O by Matthew Blake. I thought it might be interesting due to its connection to Freud's first case study, whose subject's pseudonym gives the novel its name.

The premise is that Anna Ogilvy has murdered her two best friends whilst sleepwalking, and has since been asleep for four years. A sleep doctor, Benedict Prince, is tasked with waking her.

I've paused half way with this novel too. The psychopaths and melodrama are annoying.

Of course, this is a different kettle of fish to My Heavenly Favourite, but I've been thinking about the fact that they share a concern: moral culpability.

In Anna O, the question is explicitly about agency – was Anna sleepwalking or not, and if she was, how total was her loss of control? In my Heavenly Favourite, the narrator couches his obsession in terms of a loss of agency, that he could not help being attracted to the teenager. For example, he makes a show of 'repressing' his daydreams, and when he has nightmares related to his desires, prompting him to go on a run at 2am, he says things like:

'I couldn't avoid the images that forced themselves upon me.'

The narrator would have us believe that his desires came, somehow, from without; that the fact he did not choose to have them absolves him of responsibility. This is one of the inquiries at the heart of Lolita, too.

But desires are rarely chosen, if ever – and saying that, is a different question from the moral agency involved in choosing whether or not to act. Still, that all depends on whether you believe free will exists – and that's an innocuous enough question when we're talking about eating fast food, but not here.

Writing:

I spent most of Thursday trying to find my way in to a scene, which I didn't find. The old chestnut is that, if you're blocked on a scene, the problem is always earlier. But I couldn't work out which earlier part had the problem so, on Friday, I went right back to the beginning and got bogged down in granular fiddling. This has made me think about process.

One way to write, is to have very clearly separated writing and revising stages. The popular terminology (from I think The Artist's Way) is about the 'child artist' and 'adult critic.' In the writing phase, you must stop yourself entirely from editing, and approach, as closely as possible, a condition (to return to Freud) of free writing/ association. Then, once you have a critical mass of material, you come back and shape it.

This is as opposed to another kind of process, where you go a sentence or paragraph at a time, and polish it as much as possible before moving on.

In general, I find the split writing/ editing approach useful. The openness of the first phase allows your subconscious to surprise you, to turn out events and symbols that you don't feel you could've come up with on your own. Of course, achieving that kind of openness is easier said than done. But even when it's hard, it is the clarity of this split which is so attractive. You know what you're supposed to do with your brain at each stage.

Rewriting, however, is knottier. A clear split between modes is harder to maintain. Some things need to be added, others changed, others deleted. It seems that you need to be simultaneously drafting and revising. It doesn't help that writing guides tell you 'all writing is rewriting.'

This problem reminds me of an interview that Tim Ferris did with Brené Brown, in which they discuss the difficulty of balancing striving with self-acceptance. The quandary is that, if you are able to fully adopt a kind of meditative mindset – where everything is already as it is supposed to be – this leaves little place for ambition. But the problem with ambition, or trying constantly to improve, is that everything is necessarily inadequate to begin with.

Ferris's solution to this is to say that both are important – but not at the same time.

I think rewriting is similar. The skill of rewriting is precisely being able to shift between the child artist/ adult critic modes, but at small intervals. For example, one paragraph in drafting mode, the next in revision mode.

I find that writing the new paragraphs in longhand helps too (rather than in whatever digital document the manuscript is in). Then I revise them (also longhand) and insert them.

That way, if you have to add a new part to a scene that's already well-polished, you avoid the problem of the newly drafted material looking rubbish in comparison to what's around it, which can be hard to stomach.

So you could say the key is achieving an 'equality of arms' between bits of writing.

Question:

How does the UK's disposable vape ban actually work?

Officially, single-use vapes were banned in the UK from the 1st of June – and any still-existing stock had to be recycled. Except, every petrol station and off-license still appears to be selling them.

My suspicion is that the products available have shirked the legislation's technical definition of 'disposable' or 'single-use.' Many of these products are disposable vapes, just with longer lifespans because you charge them a few times before throwing them away.

Thanks for reading! Let me know how you felt about this new format. I'm probably going to stick to it for the next few issues.

Much love and see you on Monday,

Blake