Staring down the viva

On Monday Belief finally got to the point that someone else could read it without me immediately dying of shame. So I sent it off to Lucy, only six months later than I originally intended to. It isn't a short book, and it certainly isn't a tidy book just yet, so there's no point eating my fingernails while watching my inbox for guidance on how to make it a tidy book. Which means there's nothing keeping me from prepping for my viva. And since I originally created this blog as a record of my stumblings through higher education, the whole thing would lack symmetry if I didn't record how I'm going to be doing that.

First off, 'viva' is short for 'viva voce,' which in this context is taken to mean 'defending with the living voice.' In the English system the doctoral candidate is usually orally examined on the thesis, and the examination is a factor in whether the candidate passes. In the case of UEA, the examination is performed by one member of the university, and one member from an external university, whose work is related to the subject of the thesis. I've been more than a little annoyed with my fellow Americans in the past couple of months because they can't seem to wrap their minds around this; they think the whole thing is a formality and the hard work was over when I handed in.

As far as prepping for the viva is concerned, the first thing I did was panic, because that's seemingly the first thing everyone does, and because everyone I asked who had already done it told me that the best prep was to pray, bargain, cry, and eat chocolate, which is realistic but not very helpful. The second thing I did was google around to see how people I don't know prepped for theirs, which was marginally more helpful.

The advice I found broke down into two basic categories: know your opponent, and know yourself. A bunch of them are common sense, but when you're panicking even common sense seems like black magic.

1) Hunt up the university's Examiner Report forms, and their guidelines for examiners. They'll outline exactly what constitutes a pass, a pass with corrections, a rewrite, a fail, and any other outcomes the school considers possible. That will let you skew your responses to questions so that they demonstrate your achievement of the benchmarks.

2) Find and read the examiners' work. Get a sense of what they are preoccupied with, what their views might be on your material, and how they build your arguments. In my case, discover that the external has written critical essays on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and immediately fangirl to hell and back.

3) Find out what's been published in your field since you stopped gathering material. In the same vein, make a list of what you left out of the thesis, or the literature review, and be able to defend why.

4) Put together a list of sample questions that might be asked, and start thinking about how you might answer them. There are scads of sample questions out there, all you need to do is Google. Which sounds dirty, out of context.

5) Review the actual thesis. Read the whole thing again. Put in flags to mark where chapter and section breaks are so you don't have to shuffle too much finding them. Highlight important quotes. Make a list of typos as you go through so that you can get right on to correcting them after the viva is over, and so you can strategically bring it out if typos come up in the meeting to let the examiners know that you're on top of them. Write a one-page summary of each chapter of the thesis. Look up how to pronounce words that you're not sure of, or the names of authors whose work you reference.

6) Consider what you're willing to defend to the death, and what's up for compromise. This is probably more dependant on what discipline you're in, and how subjective the work is.

7) Write down the questions that you want to ask the examiners, so you don't forget them on the day.

8) Figure out the practical concerns, such as how you're going to get there on the day.

And that seems to be all that one can realistically do. So I'm going to go off and do it.

And I'm going to eat chocolate while I'm doing it.

Notes from limbo

It's about two months until my viva, and I seem to be recovering some of the brain cells that were sacrificed to finish writing the thesis. I've also started recovering the draft of Belief that I lost, or rather piecing together a new draft from what I've still got, and since a good chunk of that is in the thesis I've had more than one horrible moment of realising that what I've handed in contains some Glaring Mistakes.

One of the major contributors to the returning brain cells is the three weeks spent in Australia over last month, first for Adelaide Writers' Week and then for some independent exploring, because spending 35 hours travelling only to turn around and come home when the work is finished is really hard to contemplate when you don't have anything seriously pressing to come home to, and because it took me most of our time in Adelaide to get over the trauma of that much time spent in a metal tube in the forcible company of people.

Writers' Week was amazing on several levels: the organisers were both inhumanly organised and superhumanly lovely, the speakers were the stuff of fantasy, and the audience members were genuinely lovely, both during the events and in casual conversation afterwards. Dave and I had the privilege of turning up before it all began and sticking around until it all ended, and we spent an agonised morning trying to figure out how many events we could afford to go to before we were told that they were all free, at which point we decided to go to all of them. And now my stack of books to read has grown exponentially, and my list of people that I'd quite like to have a drink with if ever they're in the area has expanded proportionately.

And a little bit of happy news: The Lauras has been shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature's Encore Award. 

OED, how I love thee

It's been nearly three years since I started writing Belief, the novel that's going to form the majority of my dissertation and which I'm not supposed to talk about until The Lauras has been published. Its development has been painful: the writing has been slow, the revising has been slow, the research has been impossible, and every time I dragged a chunk of it to Henry's office his response has been some iteration of, "Nope. Try again."

Until last week, when I showed him the seventh version of the first chapter, and he said, "This is it. Now make the other 140,000 words just like it. And add some more period detail."

So today I got to sit down with the printout that he scribbled on to try and fit in a little more period detail. I've been putting off adding more period detail for a while, because detail for a period that people who are still living can remember is an utter pain in the rump and other parts of the anatomy.

In the first chapter there's a single sentence about mother-daughter shopping trips. Practically a throwaway line. Except these shopping trips are supposed to take place in New York in 1963. I'm eternally grateful to the people who keep retro, vintage, mid-century and etc. blogs, because otherwise that one line would have taken me far longer than the three hours I spent on it. And I'm still nervous that someone my aunt's age is going to read it and take me to task over getting makeup fashions wrong.

The fun side of 'period' writing (I can see my mother now, having a fit because I called the decade of her youth 'period') is that I got to spend the entire day farting around on the internet and emailing relatives and can still call it work. Things I got to look up today: Jello salads, Bloomingdales, polyester, makeup, stockings, dresses, retro fashion in general, shag rugs, sunken living rooms, kitchen appliances, cocktail parties, first communion dresses, lunch counters, romance novels, movie heartthrobs, teen movies, drive-in movies, girl's athletics, field hockey, beach party films, 1969 current events, rocks glasses, the history of the words 'tart,' 'chick,' and 'queer,' and female sexual awakening because I'm 99% sure that my own was far from representative.

The best part of all of that was my discovery of the OED's historical thesaurus. How it works is this: you enter a word (in my case, 'tart') and it gives you a list of synonyms in the order in which they came into recorded usage, complete with a date of first recorded usage. So now I know that 'tart' came into use with the meaning 'woman of questionable virtue' in 1864, 'virago' circa 1000, 'carline' in 1375, 'minikin' in 1540, 'maness' in 1594, and 'lost rib' in 1647, and that there is a slew of other terms for woman with a range of connotations that really should come back into use because those commonly used now just lack something.

It is finished

I'm not entirely certain when I decided that I wanted to have three novels written by the time I turned thirty, but I know that it was long enough ago that even one novel seemed pretty dang near impossible.

 I do know that it was only a few days ago that I had the abrupt urge to finish Belief before I turned twenty-seven, because that seemed suddenly to be a talismanic milestone to achieve, and because I'd already missed the official deadline to finish the thing anyway.

So today I sat down, inked a bunch of pens, and stayed sitting down until it was finished, which took more words than I had anticipated when I wrote out the little yellow sticky note that told me how to finish it. Part of this is possibly because of the two completely unexpected sex scenes that I didn't know belonged near the end until I found myself writing them, but mostly I think I was scared to be finished with something so big, and scared to be without a first draft on the go for the first time since 2011. But there is only so much drain-circling you can do before you put down that last line and find that you've found the end.

It didn't kill me after all.

It's taken up two notebooks - there are only eight blank pages left in the second one - and a horrifying amount of ink - this morning alone took a converter and a half, and the pen companies love to go on about how long those things will last. I have no idea how many words it is, apart from knowing that it passed the 100k mark somewhere near the beginning of the second notebook.

Thumb for scale - the second notebook is at school and I'm not, so just imagine two of those. 

Some people talk about books like they're babies, which on a level I can understand. This one felt more like a tumour, except a tumour that I had to cut out of my self, an inch every day. And now that it's a mess sitting on the desk I have this weird empty feeling where it used to be. The urge to sit down and chip away at it is gone, because there isn't anything to chip away at.

Maybe now I'll actually get a chance to write some short stories again.

Home Straight

When I started on Belief (two years ago this month...) Henry made me write an outline for the whole book, so that I'd have some idea where I was going with it all. I don't naturally work from outlines, so while having a general map of where the story is going is somewhat helpful, I've found it doesn't really do much on the day-to-day level, since what happens next usually depends on what just happened and how it happened, and I can't anticipate how I will actually execute a planned scene enough to put it in an outline. So I've gotten in the habit, when I finish my drafting for the day, of outlining the next few scenes on a large post-it note and sticking them on the blank page, so that I'll have an idea of where I should take things when I sit down again. It's a new habit, and it's been working really well for this book, probably because I've had to put it down for weeks at a time to do other things and it's handy to know where I thought I was going when I last left off.

Outlining only as much of the story as I think I'll get around to writing the next time I write does have a drawback: it's felt, for the past six months, as though I will literally never finish this novel. Until about ten minutes ago, when I finished the morning's pages and picked up the post-its, and surprised myself by writing out what is going to happen to take the reader from where I left off to what the big picture outline says is supposed to be the end.

I'm just rolling with the assumption that there's no one alive that can read that.

So it looks like I'm almost done with the first draft of the major part of my thesis, which also happens to be the first draft of my third book. And the little voice in my head chirps up... I turn 27 next week - I wonder if I can get this finished by then?