PeterMBall.com

Yesterday was the last full day I’d get to spend on the thesis for over a week, and by the time I collapsed into my bed in the wee hours of morning I remember feeling upset by how little I’d achieved. Today I feel pretty good about it; frustrated, to be sure, but object enough to recognise that yesterday’s wordcount was actually pretty good by my standards.

The reason I stalled out around three AM is because I realised that while I could identify the function genre plays in the process of editing work, I wasn’t yet doing anything with the realisation except pointing out that it’s there – it’s an example in need of practical application and I’m not yet sure how to do so without actively editing a piece within the exegesis itself (and, I’ll be honest, I’ve already played that trick in the preface when addressing the genre of the exegesis). While I’m not quite at a loss on how to approach this, the idea I do have for addressing it largely involves discussing the active problems I’m having critting someone else’s work at present due to genre concerns; I could ask permission and stretch some friendships in order to do this, but it’s sufficiently awkward that I keep setting it aside and looking for something else.

In any case, the current state of the exegesis is: 12,000 words drafted; one and a half chapters close to being done; eighteen thousand words to go. I’ve got a window of about four hours in which to work on things this afternoon, which represents the longest stretch of continual time I have to work on it until Sunday morning. Tonight I have dinner with Chris Lynch and the inestimable Ben Francisco (in town from New York to wow us with his fabulousness), tomorrow I play tour guide for Ben while Chris is work, and Friday is errand day and work meetings and dinner with my Dad for his birthday. Admittedly the Saturday plans are kinda mutable – I can cancel, and may yet do so when the guilt at shirking off the thesis bears down on me – but I’m safely going to say that this will not be done by the end of February and that’s going to be cutting things very very fine with the overall completion deadline.  And even if cancelling on Ben and my Dad were things I need to do, I’m pretty sure I should be taking a break soon anyway: I’ve developing a pronounced hunch after spending too many continious hours bent over the keyboard without adequate back support (curse you, broken office chair) and my body is starting to protest the lack of sleep.

Still, for all that, I feel pretty good at the moment. Yes, the February deadline is as unmet as the January one was, but both are progress deadlines (as opposed to the May Deadline of Death). The project has limped into the zone where I’m actually excited by it, rather than daunted by, and that makes the deadline of death seem achievable rather than nightmarish.

Just dropping in with the following reports:

• The official wordcount (aka words actually in draft documents, rather than random notes) just topped 10k.
• I have, for the first time since I started the damn thing, actually finished a chapter.
• I have, for the first time since I started the damn thing, actually got a plan for proceeding that seems workable.

This, of course, just means I have to get 20,000 words written between now and Wednesday evening. That’s a far worse thing than it sounds, incidently; I could probably get 5000 words a day done in a pinch, but I’ll be utterly useless for anything else afterwards and that’s not a luxury I’m going to get anytime soon.

I suspect there will be some measure of begging for mercy in my near future.

The difference between a good days work and a bad days work can depend entirely on how close you are to meeting a deadline.

Or, in other words, 1500 words of thesis draftage today. A month ago this would have been cause for celebration; today it is met with the soul-crushing knowledge  that I haven’t yet done enough to earn myself a few hours sleep

It starts with what may well be the most dangerous question in the world right now: “So Peter, ”what happens after you finish your thesis?” 

Were I the melodramatic type, or at least the type in the mood for a different kind of melodrama than I’m running on right now, today’s entry would consist entirely of a you-tube clip of Pulp singing The Fear in answer to the question. It may yet come down to that – it’s been that kind of day, and The Fear is feeling very soundtrack-of-my-life right now, but with brave abandon I’m going to press on and risk letting some of the gloopy inner workings of my paranoia seep onto the web. 

The answer: I don’t know. It scares the hell out of me. That’s probably why I’m procrastinating.

It’s not entirely true – I know, more or less, what I plan to start writing the day the thesis is off the plate. Hell, I know what I plan on writing for the next five years. The problem lies in my inability to conceptualise some form of support mechanism around the writing (since having a writing support system is actually one of the attractive qualities of doing a PhD). Today I’ve been distracting myself with paranoia over where I’m going to live, flitting between pleasant day-dreams about moving away from Brisbane and desperately cataloging things that can be thrown out should I find myself needing to go the cheaper option of renting someones spare room rather than keeping up a lease of my own. This has distracted me for hours. I find myself missing the relative plethora of folks willing to share a house that were around in my twenties.

In short, someone needs to ship me some torpedoes, if only so I can damn them and get on with things.

I’ve always known that my flat tends to be warmer than the outside world. Just how warm was only recently brought home to me, courtesy of a thermometer reading in my study. Today, at 4 PM when I walked it, it delighted in informing me that it was 39 degreesin my workspace at present. Have now turned on the air-conditioning and am waiting for the temperature to drop before scrambling for words.

Minimal writing yesterday (50 or so words), but that was intentional. While I’m still behind, I now feel like a rational human being who lives in a nice flat in which things are clean, rather than an angst-written PhD student who lives in a hovel in which dishes pile up in the sink.

Some random stuff, not really thesis-related, from the last few days:

-  New review of Dreaming Again in Locus (Jan ’09), courtesy of Gardner Dozois; I actually scored a short mention among the discussion: Straightforward fantasy (as opposed to horror, although sometimes the line is hard to draw) is best represented by “Twilight in Caeli-Amur” by Rjurik Davidson, “The Last Great House of Isla Tortuga” by Peter A. Ball (another zombie story, but a considerably more subtle and elegant one), and ”Manannan’s Children” By Russel Blackford…

-  The Fantasy Magazine best story of 2008 poll/comment contest is still running – have you voted yet? They’ve named the top five stories in the lead after a week of voting, which includes the remarkable Watermark by Clarion peep Michael Greenhut. (On the Finding of Photographs of My Former Loves isn’t, but it’s such a strange and introspective little story that I would have been surprised if it was – I heartily endorse voting for Michael; his story is damned good). Also on Fantasy week, a non-fiction article from yet another Clarion peep, Ben Francisco, on the portrayal of 2009 in popular SF media.

-  Downloaded and read the latest issue of Kobold Quarterly; they had book reviews in there, including a quite spiffy review of Margo Lanagan’s Tender Morsels, which resulted in a moment of pure wtfbbq? level of cognitive dissonance followed by a pang of pure adoration for Wolfgang Bauer and his crew for reminding me of why I continued to subscribe to what’s (ostensibly) a d20/DnD gaming magazine despite the fact that I’ve played but a handful of DnD games in the last year or so (and run only two session). Kobold Quarterly continues to be class act, and saddens me that fantasy fiction and DnD have become so separated in my head over the years that this is actually something I feel surprised to see. 

 -  If you ask how the PhD is going and I twitch, it’s probably because I’m trying to think up some suitable lie that will make me feel better more than anything else.

So yesterday was a Nick Cave kind of day, full of bombastic self-loathing and the like. It might have gone smoother if I had realised that then, rather than this morning, and just put Henry’s Dream on repeat after posting yesterday’s entry. Instead yesterday went exactly as predicted – long periods of “I must start, I’ll do it X”  followed by internal recriminations about how stupid it was, following by long stretches of not-starting or starting-and-getting-nowhere and feeling agitated by the fact that I wasn’t starting. About 500 words ended up being done, so it wasn’t a total loss, but they’re messy and unfocused words that need thorough cutting and reshaping. I’m lost again, and hitting the daily wordcount for the thesis relies heavily on knowing the direction I’m travelling. Today I’m going to do something drastic and intentionally not do any writing; instead, the plan’s to read and cogitate and make some notes and deal with the glorious mess that is every other part of my life for a change. It will leave me behind, yes, but I’m already behind, and it may help me get back on track in a way that my current approach…isn’t.

So, yesterday. Oh, god, let’s not talk about yesterday. It wasn’t fun. Six hundred words and some insomnia, plus some word-count related angst (goal for day ten: 11000 words; actual words written: 6101). I have that awful, loomy feeling of things piling up around me again – not just the mountain of thesis related work, but of everything else that needs doing that isn’t getting done. It was the kind of day for which tetris, mindsweeper and other procrastinator games were invented – fortunately I have neither on my computer, which spared me somewhat; I have a freakin’ black-belt when it comes to procrastination, so I do my best to remove empty temptations like the above.

In lieu of actual content, I give you one of the best descriptions of the procrastination process ever, courtesy of Russel T. Davies:

“How do I know when to start writing? I leave it till the last minute. And then I leave it some more. Eventually, I leave it till I’m desperate. That’s really the word, desperate. I always thing, I’m not ready to write it, I don’t know what I’m doing, it’s just a jumble of thoughts in a state of flux, there’s no story, I don’t know how A connects to B, I don’t know anything! I get myself into a genuine state of panic. Except panic sounds exciting. It sounds all running-around and adrenalized. This is more like a black cloud of fear and failure. Normally, I leave it till the deadline, and I haven’t even started writing. This has become, over the years, a week beyond the deadline, or even more. It can be a week – or weeks – past the delivery date, and I haven’t started writing. In fact, I don’t have delivery dates any more. I go by the start-of-production date. I consider that to be my real deadline. And then I miss that. It’s a cycle that I cannot break. I simply can’t help it. It makes my life miserable.

My inability to start on time is crippling. Any social event – people’s birthdays, drinks with friends, family dos, anything – gets swept aside and cancelled, because there’s this voice inside my head screaming, ‘I HAVEN’T STARTED WRITING!’ I wake up, shower, have a coffee, watch the telly, go to town, buy some food, potter about, buy a magazine, come hom, e-mail, make phonecalls, watch more telly, and it goes on and on and on until I go to bed again, and the whole day is gone. It’s just vanished. Every single minute of the day, every sodding minute, is labelled with this depressing, lifeless, dull thought: I’m not writing. I make the time vanish. I don’t know why I do this. I even set myself little targets. At 1oam, I think, I’ll start at noon. At noon, I think, I’ll make it 4pm. At 4pm, I think, too late now, I’ll wit for tonight and work till late. And then I’ll use TV programmes as crutches – ooh, must watch this, must watch that - and then it’s 10pm and I think, well, start at midnight, that’s a good time. A good time!?A nice round number! At midnight, I despair and reckon its too late, and stay up despairing. I’ll stay that way till 2 or 3am, and then go to bed in a tight knot of frustration. The next day, the same thing. Weeks pass like that.” (The Writer’s Tale 2008: 55)

Every time I read that, I sit there thinking “yes, quite like that, actually,” except it’s not really. For starters, I’d use far fewer exclamation marks, and I’m usually pretty good at getting something written as long as I can reliably break it down into manageable parts (unless, of course, the deadline is self-imposed – those are always the first to disappear in the name of meeting external deadlines). For another, it seems remarkably dishonest; it’s like writer’s block, which is really just a way of saying  either I’m stuck and don’t know what happens next or  dear god, if I write this and it gets published people will read it and tell me what they think and it might not be good. It is a remarkably good description of yesterday, though, and my thorough inability to separate the next-thingness of the thesis from the overwhelming-wholeness of it. And, looking back on yesterday, I was both stuck and afraid of what happens when the thing gets finished, although knowing that helps not a jot when it comes to preventing today from mimicking yesterday, and my standard tactic of getting around this blockage (write something else until I come up with answers) isn’t terribly productive once you move away from the short story genre (same problem I have with novels, really). And yet, despite being behind, despite the endless hours of not-writing, despite the crippling fear, I look at the January 31st deadline and think, “sure, I’ll make that.” ‘Cause its impossible for me to conceptualise not making it, at this point, despite the fact that I’m not sure how to get from here to there.

So, yes, that was yesterday. I imagine today will be similar. And now it occurs to me that, one day, I really do want to do a paper that looks at the idea of procrastination and writer’s block from the writer’s POV.

The downside of yesterday: the writing went to hell and I started waffling again. This drives me crazy, so I stopped and thought about ways to get around it; the new plan for today is to try short, controlled bursts of wordage written over a half-hour to an hour with two-hour gaps between in which the research is pulled together.

The upside of yesterday: was finally getting books from the library. And eating cereal for dinner. And the air-conditioner, which saved my bacon when I got back from the library and realised it was 36 degrees inside my office at 4pm in the afternoon.

The university library has a mould problem. A significant mould problem that’s led to the closing down of the stacks in the library where most of the books I need are located. Couple this with the library’s odd opening hours until the semester starts and you probably get some idea of where my time went over the weekend – it took three trips, some net-time, and  some odd conversations with the librarians as I tried to explain that I didn’t know what the call numbers of the books where because I’m used to just *going there and finding them* after all these years, but I finally got about two-thirds of the texts I wanted this afternoon. The rest at basically MIA, which isn’t going to change until the mould is done with and the library returns to life.

The rest of the weekend was non-productive, but fun. Eberron game on Saturday, lunch with Angela and her fellow clarionite Lisa Hannet on Sunday where we discussed writerly things, then far to little sleep as I fretted about what I’m going to do if this library situation continues the way it’s going (probably make weekly drives to the Gold Coast, but that’s not ideal…). Now I’m fretting about being behind on the word-count again, but the situation isn’t yet untenable so I should probably stop.