Tag: 28 Days of Thesis Updates

Works in Progress

i guess that i could get crazy now baby

I’ve spent most of the afternoon rushing around the house, MC5’s Kick Out the Jams buzzing through my head. I imagine it’s going to be something of a theme song during April – it’s certainly what I plan on listening to every morning this week (although I’ll probably cheat and cycle through the innumerable cover versions out there for variety). I’ve been looking forward to April since the start of the year – one way or another, it’s been the month where I get to try and reclaim my groove as a writer of fiction rather than theory. The current plan for the coming month: Do a whole mess of rewrites that have been piling up, then get the stories submitted The problem with coordinating thesis writing and everything else isn’t finding the time to get drafts done – it’s finding the time to do the polishes and redrafting that transform those first drafts into something worthwhile. Over the last

Works in Progress

Oh baby, here comes the fear again

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

Journal

January is almost done

Congratulations to Elena Gleason, whose story Erased picked up the chocolate in Fantasy Magazine’s  best story of 2008 reader poll. Congrats also to my Clarion South peep Michael Greenhut, whose story Watermark finished in the top-five, and thanks also to everyone who put in a vote for On the Finding of Photographs of My Former Loves – to my surprise, it snuck into the top five as well. The temperature seems to have dropped to reasonable levels here in Brisbane – today I walked into my office and saw the temperature was below 30 degrees for the first time in weeks. That probably explains why the last twenty-four hours have been more productive than usual, although that could also be because I’m now loaded up with projects again after giving up January to the thesis exclusively (I suspect I’m just not built for the singular focus approach, especially not when I’m fretting about the things I’m not doing. There is still thesis work

Journal

28 Days of Thesis Updates: Day X (yes, I’ve lost track)

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.

Works in Progress

28 Days of Thesis Updates: Day Twelve

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

Works in Progress

28 Days of Thesis Updates: Day Eleven

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

Works in Progress

28 Days of Thesis Updates: Day Ten

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.

Works in Progress

28 Days of Thesis Updates: Day Nine

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.

Works in Progress

28 Days of Thesis Updates: Days Six through Eight

The university library has a mold problem. A significant mold 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 mold 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 Hannett on

Works in Progress

28 Days of Thesis Updates: Day Five

Yesterday was all about the doubt; lots of wondering whether what I’d written the day before was worthwhile and if I should continue in the direction I was going. Previously that led to massive cuts in word-count as I tried to clarify things; yesterday I just bulldozed forward and kept doing what I’m doing. Probably a good sign that it is working, on some level, unlike the other stuff. Or the panic is starting to become a productive force in terms of drafting, rather than a hindrance. Still, yesterday was slow, and I kind of argued myself into a corner as I pulled apart the idea of genre and exegesis. Not an inescapable corner, but one that stopped me cold at 3 am when my brain couldn’t quite figure out what happened next. Finished the day about 300 words under where I needed to be to ensure a January 31st wrap-up, but that’s not an insurmountable problem yet, just as

Works in Progress

28 Days of Thesis Updates: Day Four

So yesterday was the most solid day of work on the exegesis I’ve had, clocking up over a thousand words and setting up something that actually resembles a segment rather than random ideas that I’m struggling to link together. Basically I’ve been doing in the exegesis a more detailed version of what I did in the first two days here (pull apart the idea of the exegesis itself) and things just started falling into place; huzzah for blogging, without which I’d have never realised that this is what was interesting me and stopping me from going forward. And while I’m still dreadfully behind based on when I started the process, I’m now on-par as far as wordcount goes (assuming a January 31st finish for the draft), even with the massive cuts of day 3. This is calming news. I’m due a trip to the library to grab a bunch of books, since the haul I’ve got here was grabbed haphazardly

Works in Progress

28 Days of Thesis Updates: No Angst Today

It’s six o’clock. I wrote 1200 words today. Clean words. Nice words. Usable words. About a thousand of them are even in consecutive order. It’s the first time since I started this whole damned project that I’ve actually hit the word-count I needed to hit on a given day. In short, there will be no angst when I write my day 4 report tomorrow. But I still want to sit down and work on a short story instead of continuing with this.