Skip to main content

Early Death Knell

It comes down to this: I need funding.

So. Very. Desperately.

I'm teaching 7 classes this semester - and I have to design all the lessons for 5 of them. This is the amount of teaching I have to do in order to pay my fees.

That's 9 hours of contact time a week. Add in the requisite 3 hours for every 1 spent in the classroom for prep and marking (for which I am NOT paid), and it's a full time job. At least.

I'm exhausted. After marking 40 1st-years' short stories, I never want to see the written word again. And I have 20 more to go. I haven't even had time to think about my PhD studies all week.

Five years - that's how long I'll have to keep this up if I have to self-fund the entire PhD. I should take a picture of myself now, the way they do US Presidents before they take office. They age about 50 years during their terms; I have a feeling I'll age at least 30.

So I'm busting my ass to find funding, which is as plentiful for Americans in the UK as it is for white middle class males in the States. I'm willing to alter the source inspiration for my novel to whatever country or culture will fund "studies" on their mythology. I'm on conference committees and discussion forums, trying to bulk up my CV and references for funding applications, what few there are.

I have a sinking, depressing feeling that if I don't get a grant from somewhere, this PhD isn't going to happen.

On the plus side, I now have half a closet to use as an office, and they even gave me a key. Now I have somewhere to store snacks. Yes, that will make up for the fact the university cut part-time lecturer salaries by 60% in the past year, so we don't get a dime for 75% of the work we do.

We've gained a tether in our department as well - our new head of school heard about our concerns about the quality of our teaching, and assigned us a teaching coordinator/mentor. It boosts the morale, if not our bank accounts.

So, if Richard Branson or any other super rich person is reading this, know that my project is insanely awesome, commercially marketable, and I am the nicest person on the planet to give money to. Sort of.

Please?
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Storyblogging Carnival XX

Welcome to the twentieth Storyblogging Carnival. Previous Storyblogging Carnivals are archived here . Today we have ten entries from some of our favorite writers. Please note: As this is my first time hosting the carnival, I may have gotten things screwy. Let me know if links don't work, etc. Thanks! Enjoy! ________________________________________________ A sarcastic cyborg debriefs by Mark A. Rayner of The Skwib A 325 word short short rated PG-13. Imagining what a Dalek might say to a government interviewer when captured. This is skwibby fiction: stories inspired by news and current events (in this case a New Scientist piece about the nature of sarcasm). ________________________________________________ The Frog Vice-President: A Long Limbed Tale by Jason Pomerantz of Fiddle and Burn: A Daily Comic Strip in Prose A short satire, rated PG. A fairy tale of the present, ripped from today's headlines. ________________________________________________ The Meaning of a Flush by E...
9 comments
Read more

My Take on Specifications Grading (or, How I Learned to Not Spend My Weekends Marking)

I’ve been proselytizing this method for a while now, and have used it in a range of creative writing and publishing modules. It’s been wildly successful for me (though of course I’ll continue tweaking it), and enough people have asked about it that I thought I’d put it together into an overview/summary resource. It should probably be an actual paper one of these days, but that would require time and research and motivation. Natch. My teaching model is based on Linda Nilson’s Specifications Grading  (she’s also got a great intro article on Inside Higher Ed ), just so the original genius can get plenty of credit. My motivations are these: I came a hair’s breadth from burning out entirely. I went from teaching creative writing classes with 7-10 students on them to massive creative writing modules with 80+ students on them. Marking loads were insane, despite the fact that I have a pretty streamlined process with rubrics and QuickMarks and commonly used comments that I can cut and ...
Post a Comment
Read more

"Found" Art

I've been thinking quite a lot lately about the use of "found" art, as in re-appropriating images, video, code, etc., in stories.  Obviously, in my case, that means digital fiction, though I don't really think it's tied to any one communication genre or medium.  After all, there are plenty of news stories I see that use stock images that either really enhance the piece, or freakishly contrast with it.  It affects the piece, one way or the other. I also think it's related, but a bit different, from palimpsest (as defined by Genette) .  I recently supervised a fantastic MA dissertation on how everything we create (specifically speaking about creative writers) is palimpsestical: re-envisioning our lives, what we've read, what we've written.  It may be done on purpose - those intertextual references we love to embed so much - and it may be done entirely subconsciously, but in the end, the idea boils down to that frustrating and yet liberating adage that ...
1 comment
Read more