Laying down the layers

First response to first five chapters from my supervisor arrived in my email today. My supervisor is an Australian as well as being an academic. I know the two aren't mutually exclusive, but it makes him a kind of professorial 'dude', which can be disconcerting sometimes. (He says things are 'groovy' - which I like, but you have to admit it's a bit quirky)

Anyway, email arrived. I read it. I read it again. I lay down on the floor and thought about it a bit. Then I printed it out and read it. Then I called boyf and read it down the phone - blank. I started moving furniture around trying to see things from a different angle. Nothing. I rang an MA student friend who is able to understand Rachel Cusk's lectures on subjectivity and objectivity in narrative fiction ('nuff said). We took it sentence by sentence and slowly but surely I began to get to grips with what he wanted. Basically go through the whole thing and add more layers, go deeper, play around with language and style more, make it work harder.

Great. Desk looks great against this wall now.

I'd sort of planned to give some of it to an agent tomorrow. He's coming to College where I work to discuss future talks etc. So that won't be happening, because, now I understand what is needed it is patently obvious I'm nowhere near close to being ready.
This is the sort of thing that happens when you write a novel for a PhD - you take it apart piece by piece, you make every word count, you write a 'Novel' rather than a story (This is if you believe the idea that a story is simply a series of events, following plot, conflicts, characters etc. Whereas the novel tells us something about ourselves.)

The question is - which sells?
And does it matter at this moment?

My next job is to find some money to make up the rest of my fees for my PhD. I had thought the bank would give me a loan, but after a long chat with Mumbai, it seems that if I have a partial scholarship I can't get a partial or even full loan. I need to go deeper, find another layer, read the small print. The money is out there somewhere, I just need to find it.

Any writing?
Yes, some. Novel in a month starts in earnest on Saturday 19th - so if anyone is reading this and would like to join in, the idea is to get 50,000 words written in 30 days. It is how I intend to blast through the rest of this draft of my novel and will act as a nice respite from making (I quote) 'micro structural prose changes while keeping a mid voice dialogue.'

Get revved up and join the fun - you'll be glad you did and frankly I'd like the company.