Friday 23 May 2014

Conversation with my supervisor

H: "The voice is working, but the novel so far shies away from intimacy."

S: "So I need more...intimacy?"

H: "Exactly."

S: "Does that mean that I should write a scene where they have sex?"

H: "Not exactly."

S: "But sex would fix the intimacy problem, wouldn't it?"

H: "Well, that's one way to fix it."

S: "They're both from incredibly repressed backgrounds; if they have sex they'd probably die from guilt."

H: "Still. Intimacy."

S: "Right. I'll think about it."


~Later that day, while meeting with the other degree candidates~

A: "What are you doing tonight?"
S: "Drinking whisky and writing sex for Henry."
A: "...That sounds wrong on so many levels."

Big secret: Everyone's already had the Big Serious Earth-shattering conversations, and I'm probably not going to revolutionize the novel through my supervision discussions. But they certainly make me do things I wouldn't do otherwise.

In other news, my critical supervisor suddenly adores the three thesis chapters I've given her, and I submit for my upgrade in a few weeks. So, yay return of sanity, however fleetingly you may grace me with your divine presence!

Wednesday 14 May 2014

A shed of one's own

About six months ago, David bought a house. And behind that house was a garden, and in that garden was a shed. And I said, "dibs!"


Also pictured: the swing-set abandoned by the previous owner. And the pond. And a bottle of slug killer. And a million spiders.
This past weekend the spiders were energetically evicted, a school desk was acquired from the British Heart Foundation, and Dave breathed a relieved sigh for his unvarnished teak dining room table, which I had previously colonized and may have scratched just a little bit.


The chocolate is vital to the process. Trust me.

My upgrade panel has been slated for the 26th of June, which means I need to hand in all of the material on the 5th of June if I want my examiners to not hate me, which means that I should have started panicking yesterday. The fiction is nearly finished, but my critical supervisor thinks that the two paragraphs at the end of the thesis sample, where I sketchily describe the research I haven't been able to finish, are the best part and that I need to develop them into the bulk of the submission. Which seems to be a standard supervisor response. So I'm under house arrest and wishing books had a Ctrl+F option until I turn out a draft she likes or I lose my mind and run away from home, whichever comes first.

Friday 2 May 2014

I'm sensing a trend...

Last night I was going to go to bed early, because allergies are evil. But after thirty minutes or so of cycling a paragraph I'd just read on the 1980s textbooks lawsuits through my head I got back up for juuuust one minute to try and find the books they were referencing one more time. 

A lot of what I'm doing right now involves literature textbooks that were in use from 1973 to the mid 1990s. They're easier to find than I thought they would be, because people will try and make a buck off of anything on the internet and the 70s aren't that long ago, but they're also harder to find than I expected, because the publishers got really funky when they titled their books and the sellers don't follow a set way of listing them, and the 70s were about 40 years ago and who saves textbooks that long? (The books on my desk are from the Adventures in Reading series; it took a considerable amount of looking to figure out that Adventures in Reading is for ninth grade, while Adventures in Appreciation is for tenth, and that the Heritage edition is from 1980 and has different content from the Pegasus edition, which is from 1989. And that the Pegasus edition existed at all, because for some reason almost no one wanted to sell me that edition of the book.)

So I just-one-minuted myself to 1 AM, but I figured out the publisher's material structure and titling scheme, and found the books, and ordered the books, and am now waiting for the books to drop through my mail slot so I can find out if I really did figure out the titling scheme or if they were all mislisted. 

Which is exactly what happened the last time I had a breakthrough and found Adventures in Reading.

All of my massive leaps of progress happen at 1 AM.

Why do I even try and get work done during the day?