Skip to main content

On the Up Side

I have "Blog Entry" on my To-Do List today, among other things. It seems I have not been very good about posting in the past couple of weeks, in addition to not having been very good at lots of other things.

The issue really is that I was awarded a teaching assistantship at the very last minute before classes started, and I've spent the first month of term getting up to speed, as well as getting all my little freelance gigs out the door (still working on some of those).

So I haven't done much actual research (read: writing) lately.

That ends today, as I have several paragraphs down now on the first story of my PhD, and I've started outlining the next paper I've got planning (on applying cinematic adaptation of visual narrative to digital fiction - it makes sense in my head). The story started forming at 5 a.m. this morning, which made for a rather restless sleep as I plunked a sentence or two every so often into my iPhone. The character is growing.

Other notable moments over the past few weeks:
  • Karin Kukkonen (Tampere/Mainz) came to Bangor to give a research talk on the study of comic books. It was a really well-organized talk (using prezi.com rather than PPT, thankfully), and she handed out copies of her bibliography, which I think everyone should do. I was glad to see that most of what I'm looking into WRT visual narrative was there on her list - some confirmation I'm barking up the right trees, anyway.
  • I had my first experience with annotated bibliographies, as I was required to submit one for my supervisor meeting this month. I had to look them up (the OWL has a good article). Thanks to my OCD and the fact that I've used Zotero to track my resources from the start, I didn't have to create it from scratch. I think the AB might be pretty useful to me, especially as I've split it into sections according to what area the research falls into (critical, creative, specific papers, etc.). The SCSM PGs have started a collection of ABs on our wiki, which should be a good resource for us in the future.
  • I'm gathering a lot of cool info on e-publishing and writer-directed publishing projects (like Robin Sloan's Kickstarter Project and Cory Doctorow's model, among others). Hoping to have a paper out of it next summer.
And I think that's about all I have. Hopefully the research gets into full swing this week, and I'll have more to add soon. Until then, consider me writing.
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

If It's for Children, Why Is It So Naughty?

I have a sore throat. For this malady, I requested popsicles, preferably anything resembling Jell-O Pudding Pops (click the link, seriously. It's more than you bargained for). My Australian husband, who has never known the joy of pudding pops or Bill Cosby expounding their benefits (J-E-L-L-O!), got me these: Let's ignore for a moment how creepy I find the whole Jelly Babies phenomenon. I mean, you're eating babies , for chrissake. Stalin didn't even eat babies (AFAIK). Of course, the concept is babies; the reality is they're about the size and shape of a 9-week-old fetus. Even if you aborted a fetus that size, you wouldn't eat it. I hope. But Wobbly Lollies aren't baby/fetus shaped. Rather, they've flown backward in the reproductive process, back through growth phases and cell differentiation. Back through mitosis, through fertilization. Swimming backward through the jelly-lined uterus through the cervix, out the vagina, right back up the ...
3 comments
Read more