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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.

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