Thesis mode

My memory is odd. Looking back I get the impression that I've spent the last six months in general idleness, avoiding work and skiving off, and present Sara hates past Sara because of it, because when the looking back occurs present Sara is usually hustling to meet a deadline and wondering why past Sara didn't take care of it. But when I flip back through my diary it becomes clear why past Sara didn't take care of it, because past Sara generally does far more hustling of other types than present Sara remembers.

Today was the day that the first rough draft of my critical thesis was due to my supervisor. A week ago today was the day that I actually began working on it, because in the month before that I owed Henry 20,000 words, taught for FLY, presented at a conference, spent a week in the US doing research, judged a short fiction prize, had Annual Progress Review, and more or less kept up with the planning of my own conference. So the acrimony directed at past Sara was generally groundless, as very little skiving took place.

I've been writing up my research periodically as I've gone along, more as notes on what I've done than as actual readable material, and I've churned out a handful of self-contained pieces, so writing the first draft was less 'writing' than 'figuring out what part of what I already had was useable.' And if I'm bad at remembering what I've done, I'm even worse at remembering what I've already included in a document. So instead of approaching the thesis with any dignity, I took the arts-and-crafts line of attack:

Print it out, cut it up, sort like with like, put it back together, throw away the extra pieces. Just like Ikea.

I don't remember when I started doing it this way - no surprise there - but 'cut it all up and put it back together in an order that makes sense' seems to be the only way that I produce nonfiction that's in any way readable. 

It's kinda depressing to think that that's my critical output for the past three years. 

The risk, of course, is that all of the cutting and pasting and sorting out will take up so much time that the draft will be done in theory when the deadline pops up, but won't have made it back onto the computer. So far that hasn't happened, but I won't be surprised if one day I wind up hand-delivering a nine-foot sheet of taped-together paragraphs in lieu of a Word document. 

The whole was finished and sent at about ten this morning, with much fear and trembling because it's both far longer than my supervisor is expecting and far rougher than I was hoping it would be. Though, when I first sat down a week ago and looked at what I had, I hid under the desk and refused to come out because I thought I had absolutely nothing to show for the past three years, so I suppose I'm in a 100% better position than I expected to be.

Missing in Action

At the moment I'm sitting in a surprisingly large hotel room in Morristown, New Jersey, trying to find the will to sort my suitcase out, because it's going to have to be dropped tomorrow morning into the trunk of a car that's not mine and transported to the airport. I'm naturally going with it, but since nobody is going to be weighing me on arrival I require much less sorting.

Yesterday afternoon I presented the paper that I dropped off the face of the earth a few weeks ago to write as part of a panel dealing with censorship in public education. The room was surprisingly full, the questions were interesting and answerable, and I've finally met another human being who spends a horrifying amount of their time looking at textbooks. And since I presented on the first day, I got to spend today actually enjoying other peoples' papers instead of trembling in the corner with nerves. Even with the trembling, it was wonderful to finally feel as though I'm a part of an academic community; my research doesn't have much in common with that of the rest of my cohort, so a lot of the time I feel like the madwoman in the corner, pegging away at something that no one cares about. Meeting even one person who already gets it, let alone over a dozen, was worth the distance travelled.

This is probably the most productive trip I've ever been on: about two weeks ago I flew into DC and bribed my younger sister to drive me so that I could do a final round of location research for Belief, then spent nearly a week harassing relatives about their memories of their misspent youths, also for Belief, then dragged myself several states north for the conference. And now I get to skedaddle back to England to do something with it all before too much time passes and I can't understand my own notes.

And, of course, get back to helping organise a conference at UEA for this December. I'm sure the other plotters are just thrilled with my recent inability to answer email.

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.

Back at the ranch...

It may not look like it, but the third year of the PhD has actually kicked off, and I've been actively participating in it.  So far, it's been a bit like going to cross the street, successfully dodging an out-of-control car, only to have a sinkhole full of bears open up beneath me the moment I hit the far sidewalk. Suddenly all of the Personal and Professional Development sessions on grant writing and job hunting are relevant and necessary, and a year isn't looking like a whole lot of time to get what I've done so far into the shape of a thesis. At some point in the past month or so the weekly beer-and-bitch session in the grad bar turned into a water-and-plan-this-conference-we-want-to-make-happen session, a different group of people cornered me in the bar while I had a fever and now I'm part of the group running the annual short story contest, and I'm scared to open any of my email inboxes.

 The first draft of Belief has been done for long enough that the feeling of accomplishment has worn off, but not so long that I've gotten around to typing it all up, which doesn't matter so much because I'm only allowed to submit 80,000 words of it at maximum. (The fact that I've groused about this at length should surprise exactly nobody). For months now I've been saying, mostly to Henry, that I need to sit down with that first 80k and give them a structural pounding before anything else useful can happen, but for various reasons ("It's summer! School is ages away!! Let's go to this festival and talk to people about books!!!) I've polished up random bits of new material to meet the past few deadlines and weathered the 'you can do better than this' lectures that they elicited.

Ok, it wasn't all laziness and butterflies; my other supervisor gave me the first week of November as the deadline to send her a reasonable draft of a 35 page journal article and I dropped pretty much everything but Shore stuff in order to get it done. Except she's on research leave and I haven't heard back from her since I sent the draft and I'm scared to message again and ask if she's seen it because I know she's going to give me another deadline that I can't make.

But I've finally gotten nervous about the ultimate deadline: October 2016 will mark the end of three years in the program and the beginning of when I'm allowed to submit a thesis. It also marks the end of my funding and the point when I really need to have figured out what I'm going to be doing, professionally speaking, after UEA ejects me from her sacred halls. And between that and Henry's almost telling off the fire appears to be lit beneath my posterior.

So how, exactly, do you turn 160,000-odd rambling first draft words into something that can be turned in without it looking like you're taking the piss? I have no idea, but here's what I'm doing:

It's been two years since I wrote the opening pages of the draft, so I honestly haven't got a clue what happens in the beginning, besides knowing it doesn't look a lot like what's on my outline. So  I sat down with the first 100,000 words of the draft and went through, page by page, writing an outline of what actually happens in the book, along with the dates because I am horrible at keeping timelines. Once that was done it was easy to see that I'd jumped all over the timeline while I was writing it, frequently revisiting earlier passages or jumping ahead to scenes I felt like writing. So I cut up the outline (all five pages of it) and put it in the order it was supposed to be in, and then used that as a guide to cut up the actual 100,000 words and put them in the order that I should have had them in in the first place. That was actually the quick part. The past few days and the rest of the weekend have been given over to the slow part: going through a paper copy of the manuscript with a needle-tipped blue pen, marking up all of the places that need to be expanded or moved or have details added, reconciling ages and dates and crossing chunks of needless waffling out, and writing up sticky notes with the details of scenes that need to be added but that I didn't know needed to be added when it was all out of order.

It's incredibly messy, and it does make me wish a little bit that I had written the book chronologically. But I've never really been able to write chronologically; more often than not, it's later scenes that make me realise what ought to have come before. And at any rate, it beats doing taxes.

What is wrong with these people?

The weekend has been given over to the writing of the article I was meant to send to Rachel about a month ago, which means a lot of today has involved using Google Books to search for lines I half-remember from sources I got out on Inter-Library Loan last year but couldn't use for my actual thesis draft because there's only so much insanity that can be packed into 30,000 supposedly academic words. Specifically, I spent two hours searching for the sources where I first read about the event described below, less because it was the perfect lead-in for the section of the article I'm working on and more because it's so twitch-inducing that I've wanted to use it somewhere since the first time I read about it:

There is a long history of pressure groups influencing the content of textbooks in the United States, but the history of religious and specifically Christian pressure and influence has the longest standing. An incident that goes a long way towards providing sufficient historical context is that which occurred in Philadelphia in 1844, one of many such incidents that took place in the United States at the time, which is best summarised as a lengthy dispute between the Protestant majority and Catholic minority over Bible reading in the public school. It will probably surprise a modern reader somewhat that the issue was not that the Bible was being read, but that the version used was not in keeping with the practises of the Catholic Church of the time, and both parents and bishops objected to the Catholic student minority being forced to participate.  The initial request that Catholic students who refused to read the Bible aloud in class not be beaten for their refusal was generally ignored by school officials, and further requests were met with violent anti-Catholic demonstration on the part of Protestants who believed that the failure to fully ‘Protestantise’ Catholic children would lead to a Catholic takeover of the United States.Other religious minority students, such as those of the Jewish and Quaker faiths, faced similar challenges, and it appears that the school boards generally considered having the teachers flog students who made protest on religious grounds as opposed to expelling them outright to be a more than sufficiently merciful accommodation of their beliefs.[i]

This is the sort of thing that makes me wish I could timehop a few hundred years into the future to see what our descendants think of this whole censorship matter, especially the part where adults are so determined to keep teenagers and young adults from learning about things like biology, anatomy, and critical thinking (think I'm joking? Wait until I get around to the next article). But then, if I was offered the chance to see where this goes I probably wouldn't want to take it. If the past is anything to go by, it's even odds that our descendants will be just as committed to a slightly different yet equally disturbing vein of censorship. 

 

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[i] I haven't found all of the sources from which this paragraph draws, but the major one is Joan Delfattore, The Fourth R: Conflicts Over Religion in America's Public Schools.  (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 32-46.

Just another day of revision...

My web browser has tabs open to the UC Davis Veterinary Medicine page, the Doctor of Vet Med curriculum, a search result on crisis pregnancy centres, a page of search results on 'adoption in the 1980s', a history of forced sterilisation in the US, a calendar for 2004, several Google street views of Las Vegas, the Wikipedia page for second-wave feminism, several photographs of New England lobster boats and Floridian crab boats, the Web MD brief history of mifepristone, and Amazon pages for Building Your Cult: Power, Politics, and People and Combatting Cult Mind Control, two indispensable volumes for the modern reader.  Drugs don't get much of a look-in this time because I did way more research than was really necessary for The Shore, and I have the kind of freaky memory that can't recall my spouse's birthday but can perfectly recall useless information from years ago.

The good thing about all that is that the novel is no longer riddled with embarrassing notes like (insert two paragraph description of a crab boat). The bad thing is that it's starting to get too long to be easy to handle, which is odd because it seemed almost too short to be a proper novel, both when I was first writing it and every time I look at the skinny little notebooks in which I wrote it. I have an unhealthy preoccupation with tracking my progress in fractions, which gets more difficult at a certain length because Word gives up on providing a word count once the 100,000 word mark is reached. After 99,999 you're on your own for some reason.

Pictured: the moment before I stopped being able to figure out exactly how many words I had left to clean up without a serious amount of jiggery-pokery.

The beast still lacks a title, but I'm starting to be a little less ashamed of it, or most of it at any rate. Though I do wonder what the NSA makes of my Google habits.