My Writerly Blog

It is officially Spring break, mid-semester break, whatever you want to call it. I will not call it Easter break, as the school officially does, because I find that officially dunderheaded. Ugh. Anyway, for the next three weeks, I get to do nothing (well, not much more than) but write and work on my PhD stuff. My plan is to increase my writing sessions to 4 per day, 3 for my short story (that is nearly done) and 1 for the novel that's been languishing in the bowels of my computer for the last 6 months. It has a way better chance of winning the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award than my current one does, at least IMO. Once the rough draft of the story is completed, I can spend a little more time exploring the digital adaptation side of it. I have to admit, part of my procrastination process today has been to start this exploration already, by looking into wiki-building programs. More on that later. I've already found that without the pressures on my time, it's hard for m...

I attended the second session (having missed the first due to being brain dead) of the Collaborative Digital Research in the Humanities (CEDAR) postgraduate training program this past weekend. (Don't ask me about the acronym.) The topics covered corpora and wikis, specifically with regard to knowledge sharing and collaboration. The corpora discussion was very linguistic-based, and so not much was very directly applicable to my own work. I can use the tools to do some curiosity-led analysis of my work, figuring out which words come up the most frequently in a piece of fiction, and in what relations and contexts they appear. Of course, what I found when I did this on my novel WIP is that the character names overwhelmed everything else. Duh. But this topic also included something a little fun, in the form of Wordle . This is a fun little web "toy" that takes in a plain text file, a blog, and a few other source types, and builds a word cloud that you can then play with ...

I should have done this a couple of months ago... I guess I could post-date it, but I'll be all honest and stuff. At the beginning of this semester, I had a supervisor meeting, which inspired me to draw up a plan for how I'm going about this PhD. It's a good plan. Plans are great and all, but only as far as they actually work. So as I've used semesters (3 per year, fall, spring, summer) to milestone my plan, I'm going to post one of these at the end of each semester to see how I'm doing, and to see if I need to adjust my plan at all. Here goes. Semester 1 (Fall 2008) Plan & Outcomes: Plan: Explore idea, background of North Wales for inspiration for print novel Outcome : Did a lot of exploration, read some Welsh mythology, wandered around Anglesey taking pictures. I have a lot of ideas now for the novel, and not just based in Welsh mythology. I think this is going to take on a bit more of world mythology, sort of a globalization theme that reflects what ...

It's called Easter Holiday here, but that does not clearly express the sense of freedom and liberation that is a 3-week spring break. Plus, I'm not Christian or pagan, so Easter just means more Cadbury mini-eggs to me. Anyway... It's been stressful so far in the term. I'm surviving, but barely. The triathlon training is finally taking its toll, and I'm grinding my teeth in anticipation of a job - any job - coming up on the boards that will allow me to continue my studies and hire a housecleaner. I hate cleaning house. I've adopted a strategy that I hope will allow me to meet my targets this semester: I'm writing for 20 minutes a day in timed sessions. So far, it's working. The story that would not budge is budging - moving and flowing even. It's a shitty first draft, but it's there. The good news of yesterday - being a quarterfinalist in the Amazon Breakthrough Novelist Awards - is already stressing me out. People are excited for me, and ...

Yes, I remember entering this contest...vaguely. Very vaguely. Oh well. Received notification this morning that I am one of 500 quarterfinalists (out of a maximum 10,000 entries, that's not bad). You can see my novel excerpt at http://www.amazon.com/dp/B001UG3B4U . Please download it, review it, pass it on to your friends. (If you're not in the US, you can view the excerpt on my site here .) It's a pretty big deal contest: Grand Prize is a publishing contract with Penguin and a $25k royalty advance. If I make it to the final round, I'll be stumping for votes. I hate that system, because it means the best campaigner wins, not necessarily the best novel, but you have to work with what you've got, I suppose. Let's keep our fingers crossed, shall we?

I've written fiction now for a while, always intended for print publication. The adages there are always "first drafts are shit," "we're not writers, we're REwriters," and "revise, revise, revise." We hear about Hemingway reworking his prose over and over, until he was merely deleting and inserting the same comma. It works for print fiction. It leaves you with a refined, polished piece that (hopefully) no one can poke holes in. Every writer develops a process for their stories. Some sit down and write and write and write, letting whatever may come out spill across the page, the story shaping itself minute by minute. Others plan and plan and plan, like navigators mapping a trip. They know exactly where they're going, and how to get there. I've always been a bit in between. I know where I'm going - I have a destination - and I vaguely know some stops I might make along the way, but I'm usually up for interesting detours an...

It's a lovely week. I teach two classes (same module, twice) for the English department, and on the schedule this week rose two lovely words: "Reading Week." It's a really fancy way to say "no class." So I've only had to focus on teaching my poetry classes, which means I have today (Thursday), and all of tomorrow afternoon to do what I'm meant to be doing every week: writing for my PhD project. What am I doing right now? Paying bills, backing up my computer, researching kilts in my clan tartan, commenting on Facebook photos... Some call it procrastination. I call it warm-up. My list for the day: finish doing my US taxes, run, cycle, ride my horse, write a blog entry, and get 1000 more words down on my story. I'm forcing myself to write on the story for an hour before I can run, cycle, or ride. 10 a.m., and here I am, just beginning to write a blog entry. I'm thinking it's like getting to the pitch an hour before the game, meanderin...

We had another departmental discussion on practice-based (and practice-led...the difference is subtle, but definite) research today. The first time I heard GH's talk on the subject, it was amongst a bunch of postgrads, most of whom were conducting some sort of practice-led/based research, who all stared up at the PowerPoint a bit slackjawed. Not much discussion sparked. But today the discussion was held amongst staff and a couple of the PhD candidates who are venturing into this realm. A lot more came out of it this time: It was interesting to note how traditional academics view this area of research. To them, it seems nebulous, hard to pin down, and somewhat arbitrary. Practice-based research, in particular, gave them difficulty. Do we want PhD candidates who have talent in a creative area, but who have little or no critical thinking capabilities? How do you evaluate a creative piece for PhD qualification? How does simply producing a creative piece contribute new knowledg...

I'm Super Organized Girl. Maybe it's my father's diluted OCD in my genes, recombined with that of my maternal grandmother. Maybe it's the decade I spent as a professional writer, coordinating projects and people and schedules and 600 page documents and all their changes for the year or so it took to build them. Maybe it's just me. I make lists. I make schedules, then I synchronize them between my computer, my phone, my email account. I know what I'm doing next Tuesday at 3:13, and the Tuesday after that, and the Tuesday after that. So when I embarked on this PhD project, I wrote out a plan for myself. Half the time, I think the planning is the most fun part of any project. It's when you're still full of hope that you can actually get the monstrous thing done. It's when you can break it down into detailed pieces, finding places to celebrate for crossing milestones, accomplishments you can reward yourself for. It's the post-planning that s...

My department started this incredibly helpful, cruel, beneficial, nerve-wracking thing they call the Shark Tank. It's open to any staff or postgraduate in the Humanities (I think the Sciences have a similar thing). Every so often some brave soul offers themselves up as bait, submits a paper they're intending to submit for publication, and lets the group rip it to shreds in an hour after lunchtime. I, being a bloody idiot, decided to be the first postgrad to suffer this fate. Well, I didn't decide it; I thought my officemate and fellow New Media PhD was going first. But she took baby steps, letting our New Media Research Circle take a bite on her paper first, rather than facing up to the entire College. That dropped me headfirst into the water. I'd been working on a paper since last semester, using online author websites (like Neil Gaiman's, Jasper Fforde's, and Jim Butcher's) as models for a bridge for readers to learn digital storytelling conventions. ...