Hunters in the Snow by Daisy Hildyard

I've finally submitted my PhD dissertation, which means that I can read books for enjoyment and not just work. As soon as I have finished James Robertson's And the Land Lay Still, I'm going to be reading Hunters in the Snow by Daisy Hildyard.

I know Daisy, we have both just finished and submitted our dissertations at Queen Mary, University of London, and have been on panels about archives and anecdotes - although our fields are separated by at least three hundred years. Hunters in the Snow is sure to be a great book, and the first of many. The fact that Daisy has managed to finish both a novel and a PhD dissertation in the last few years is very impressive - she is an inspiration to us all! I wish her lots of success with this novel and am really looking forward to reading it.

AcWriMo III: derailed

Today has been less about writing and more about making sure I have the information to hand so that I can move forward with my chapter, which means I haven't done my 1200 words today. Yesterday went a bit wrong on the AcWriMo front because I had to leave the house and didn't get the opportunity to sit in front of my laptop until late, by which time I was tired. Tomorrow I have meetings but I hope to get something written by hand when I am travelling on the train to and from London.
This is all a bit frustrating because I wanted to have a productive week and build on the momentum generated at the end of last week, so on Thursday morning I will refocus and spend a few minutes setting some writing goals for that day. This is something which is really encouraged by the Thinking Writing department at QMUL and when I remember to do it I do find I am more productive. This evening, after reading through and doing a rough edit of the work I have written so far, I am going to spend a few minutes working out which section I want to focus on and then outline some goals so that I can focus them on Thursday morning.

AcWriMo II

Although I'm a little over a week late in discovering AcWriMo and signing up to it, I've now committed to writing 1200 words a day (which is sometimes achievable and at other times a bonkers goal) which comes out as 25200 words over 21 working days - which I began on Friday 9th November, writing 1125 words on the laptop and probably around 100 in a notebook on the train on the way home.

If I achieve the 25200 it would mean a first (but hopefully not too rough) draft of my final chapter, a 250 word abstract for a journal submission and the surgery done on the second chapter which I've neglected for about 18 months - if not longer - and maybe even some other work as well. My main aim and major focus, however, is to complete my final chapter, not necessarily to write that many words.

Even though I discovered AcWriMo late I found that because I was starting writing my chapter this month anyway, I had already done some of work to meet some of the 6 rules of AcWriMo.

1. Set goals: I changed my goals after signing up and set a daily word count aim well above what I would usually set. So 1200 words a day 5 days a week and finish the final chapter.

2. Publicly declare participation and goals: doing that here now.

3. Draft a strategy: I've been reading and planning throughout October so I know what the strategy is - it is written down in ink in a notebook.

4. Discuss what you are doing: I will be doing that on here, maybe daily, maybe not because repeatedly posting 'I wrote 1200 words today' would be boring. One of the things I do want to think about is the process of academic writing, and how different processes might be useful.

5. Don't slack off: Phd students specialise in procrastination. Please feel free to post daily in the comments section to increase my sense of guilt over any thoughts of procrastination, or just to provide encouragement.

6. Publicly declare your results: AcWriMo is due to finish on 30th November, but I will actually be continuing until 7th December partly because I'm a week late in signing up to this, and partly because my chapter deadline is 7th December.

AcWriMo

I'm on another 'writing retreat' at the moment; my issues with the word 'retreat' remain, but again it has been a useful thing to do, and sitting in a room with other people who are also writing creates a sense of silent collaboration in a shared goal.

The end of this PhD is in sight (sort of, maybe) but I still feel too distant from the possibility of finishing, but today I wrote the first 2000 words of my final chapter. These words are not in continuous sentences, some are just random sentences stuck somewhere at the bottom of the document as ideas which pop up but while others are proper paragraphs. I need to read it this evening and work out what I need to do tomorrow to make the same level of progress.

Coincidentally I learned this evening from another waif and stray staying on the floor of the same London flat as me while we're both in the city for work things that alongside NaNoWriMo there is AcWriMo which I'm now signing up for in the hope that it will continue the sense of collaboration in a shared goal and spur me on to complete this chapter by 7th December.

Deadlines. Deadlines. Deadlines.

About ten days ago I decided to use a part of my diary (a bright green Leuchtturm1917, A5 size page a week style, in case anyone is interested) I've never bothered to make use of before: the page at the front which lists all the months and days of the year, and which does not have enough space to do anything but circle the relevant date. Before now this has seemed a bit pointless to me - I'm likely to forget what is important about the circled date - but then I realised that working towards a big, scarey, PhD endgame deadline without any general, easily accessible, overview of what I needed to do by when was going to make things, well, scarey. And stress inducing. So for the first time I made use of those little numbers at the front of the diary and circled the relevant numbers for chapter deadlines in red (Diamine Passion Red cartridge), supervision meetings are circled in Noodler's Navy - I am sure at different points new colours denoting different things will emerge, but these are the important things for the time being. I now know what I am working towards on a month to month basis - in my head I already knew this, but putting it on paper has made it clearer and also more immovable, making me create a structure - I am trying to do this but it does not always work.

While I was trying to instigate a better working regime and structure for writing the final three chapters of my thesis, The Guardian Books section online ran this blog post: Write or Die: can a $5 app cure writer's block? I'm not sure about the concept of 'writer's block' being an inability to actually put one word after another. For me it is usually not a writing block, but a thinking block. Next week I am attending a PhD Writing Retreat for two days - run by a department called Thinking Writing - I'm looking forward to it, but the idea of it is also making me cringe slightly inside (the 'retreat' bit is mostly causing the cringing I think - it simultaneously sounds a bit 'hippy' and a bit like I am running away from something), and I'm worrying about having to write in a room full of other people. I usually write in a room on my own (Mrs Woolf was right, but inflation means £500 a year doesn't really make it very far these days). Is it going to be weird typing sat next to someone? And what about all that thinking happening in one room? Whether or not it will be a successful two days remains to be seen, but I am hoping it will give me the impetus to finish the first draft a little bit early, allowing me some days off and some sleep, which I really do need, not because I am working through the night (this may yet happen), but because I am just tired.

What the writing retreat has done already (by way of a little exercise I have to do before I attend) is make me think about my process for thinking and writing. Thinking back to the last two 'big' projects I have done - my undergraduate dissertation and my MA dissertation, neither of which are anywhere near the length of the PhD thesis, although the MA was about the length of one thesis chapter - I realise the way in which I work now is very different to how I was working on those projects. I wrote the bulk (7000 words approximately) of the first draft of my undergrad project in a crazy burst of binge writing one night - I can't remember how many hours but I recall tinkering with it for most of the day, then having dinner and going back to it at around 8pm or thereabouts - by 5.30am the following morning I could hear the birds singing outside and was hitting the save button for the last time that night. I crawled into bed and woke about five hours later. I can still remember the elated feeling when I woke up and have yet to recapture it. I can also remember the look my supervisor gave me the following day when we stood over the department printer: the look told me I was crazy, but understood that I had needed to go through this process, even though the final deadline was some weeks away. My MA dissertation was written in about 14 days after life derailed the project massively. When I finished it I didn't feel anything except for relief and exhaustion. The only reason I finished that project was because I had to, and I managed to find an amazing archive which gave me huge amounts of material to work with, but mostly because of a remarkable and supportive supervisor. I'm lucky to have both these supervisors as my PhD supervisors now.

My process at the moment seems to be that I spend the morning writing slowly, if at all, and then having a productive afternoon. But, the key thing is I have to spend the morning working slowly at the chapter, because I if get side-tracked and spend the morning doing something else, the afternoon is wasted. I think - and hope - that this is because I spend the morning 'thinking' about the writing, but not getting much done, giving me space to write better in the afternoon. If I do not give myself the space to do the thinking in the morning, the writing in the afternoon does not happen, or is minimal, because there is no thought to support it.

Of course there is always The Fear. I've written some good work in the past when I've had The Fear; but is is debilitating, and I am tired enough as it is without Fear induced collapse occurring. So for now I am going to be content with achieving 600-1000 words a day.

I confront The Fear head on when it arrives in December. Which it will.

MindNode Software Review

I've been battling with my chapter for sometime. To begin with I had a big panic about where the chapter could be situated within the rest of the project - when I first sat down to think about it, this chapter seemed to have nothing to do with the rest of the project. After some major procrastination and a big conversation with my supervisor I finally found a way to get it to work. More procrastination ensued, followed by my Canada trip, and never ending marking. 

When I finally sat down to start writing last week I found myself writing random lists, thoughts, post-it notes, and then leaving these ideas in a messy heap of paper. The system wasn't working; well mainly there wasn't a system. One of the courses I've been teaching this academic year is a second year undergraduate course which prepares the students for planning and writing a final year research project. At some point in the term one of the lecturers told the students about a brainstorming website called bubbl.us so I thought I'd give it a try. It was useful, but the downside is that it requires you to be on the internet to use it. The internet is great, but it is a great source of distraction, and I really do not need any form of distraction, so the internet gets turned off when I am writing because otherwise I just end up faffing about looking stuff up.

Looking on the App Store I came across a few mind-mapping/brainstorming type apps and thought I'd give one of the free ones a try. I downloaded MindeNode Lite because it looked fairly simple and unfussy - which it is. To create a new mindmap you just open a new MindNode document and get clicking and typing.

My only major criticism though was that when making the mindmap the new nodes (lines) were created underneath the existing ones (you can see this on the yellow lines) which meant there was all this space at the top which was going to waste. After some fiddling I discovered that you can move the nodes up or down by clicking and dragging, but it would be great if new nodes appeared at the top as well and underneath existing nodes without having to be dragged up there.

The maps tend to naturally develop horizontally, so the whole map becomes a bit too linear for my liking, but a bit of dragging and this can be changed. The Pro version of this app may do these sorts of things automatically, and you can also do things like add links and photos, but I'm not sure I need something like that at the moment - maybe once I've proved the usefulness of the software to myself and when I've got an income again in 2013 I'll upgrade to the Pro version.

I've only been using MindNote Lite for a few days, but it has been useful so far and I hope as I get to know the software better I'll use it more and it will work in the way that I want it to. It has already helped me to get a complicated narrative sequence in one Poliakoff drama sorted out in my brain.

I'll probably recommend this to my students - it is compatible on iphone, ipad and Mac - as using an internet based program can be dangerously time consuming and distracting when you are planning and writing a big project with an immovable deadline.

Accident

One of the big problems with my job is that (like so many other people) I spend an unnaturally long time sat in front of a computer. On top of that I have a long term back injury ( 17 years and counting) and an inability to say no to biscuits. I've been trying and failing to go to the gym (when at home) or swimming (when in London). Getting to the gym means a 30 minute round trip in the car, an hour there, and changing etc, and two hours have gone by before I know it. In London if I want to go swimming I need to be in the pool by 7am if I want to avoid the crowds, and this just hasn't been possible over the last few months - I've managed it a few times, but I've been so chronically tired that I need every minute I can get.

If I don't exercise my back gets worse, along with everything else, so after some thought I decided cycling at home would be best. My old bike was knackered and slightly on the small side, so I forked out what was left of my teaching money and got a new hybrid bike. I've been doing well and getting out on it almost every day, but on Monday a pick up truck decided to clip me ever so slightly whilst on a country lane and a combination of things sent me flying. Nothing broken thankfully, but really bashed and bruised, my left hand took all the weight of the fall, got pretty skinned, and now typing with it is really quite uncomfortable, my knees are blue and purple and I can't laugh because my ribs hurt too much.

Unfortunately this has set me back about 5 days on the writing front, partly because of the general pain, the painkiller induced brain fog, and now having to type with only one hand. It also means that my 442 words a day have now become 521 words a day. I know it isn't much of a difference, but at the moment every single word is mentally taxing. I just hope that sometime in the next few days my brain shifts into a more engaged gear and manages to come up with more like 1000 words a day.

Links to Stuff VI

It is a Bank Holiday weekend here in the UK, which naturally means that it is raining. I have no excuse not to write some PhD words over the next three days then. Hope those of you having days off and parties aren't getting too drenched. London was awash with bunting and flags when I left on Thursday. 

I have finally finished all my marking for this academic year. Well theoretically I have - some work always manages to appear out of the woodwork after I think I am done...

As promised a guest blog post on Einstein on the Beach written by Peter Falconer will be posted here shortly, and I am (slowly) working on a long post about the current state of British television drama - the idea for post was prompted by this article in The Guardian by the playwright and screenwriter Abi Morgan, but also by my own research and response to what is on television on a nightly basis.

The British Museum has a wonderful exhibition called The Horse which is running until 30th September 2012. Readers of this blog will know my love of plants, and the BM also has an outdoor exhibition called North American Landscape which runs until sometime in November, so it will be interesting to see how the exhibition changes and develops with the seasons. Both exhibitions are free.

For reasons I can't explain I quite like this band based in West Wales: Paper Aeroplanes. 

The poet Kathleen Jamie has a new book of essays out. Jamie's first was the beautiful and compelling Findings, the new book is Sightlines. I'm looking forward to reading it in July when I will have finished this chapter of my PhD - 12,518 words to go, 442 words a day between now and 1st July.

Update

I haven't been blogging for a while because between January and March I was teaching and marking and attempting (and failing) to make progress with my PhD, and then the beginning of April managed to produce the Worst Week of My Life - which we won't go into because it makes me sad.

Yet more marking has arrived and I have a week to do it; once the marking is off my desk I will have five weeks to write chapter 4 of my PhD and until 7th January 2013 to finish my PhD. That is an actual, set in stone, deadline.

The blogging will continue to be erratic, and may consist of 'Please make it stop' at various intervals. In the meantime, a guest blog post by my friend Peter Falconer about our experiences at Einstein on the Beach a couple of weeks ago will appear here when Mr Falconer has deciphered his notes (he was very studious and filled most of a notebook). Since Einstein we've been to The Flying Dutchman at the ENO, which was much shorter, but also much less amazing, but did boast some very excellent video projection designed by Nina Dunn.

A while back I wrote about the importance of titles, and Peter has written along similar (but probably more amusing) lines about song titles. If you are interested you can find the post on the PFlog.

Links to Stuff II

Baz Productions are a very exciting theatre company based in London who recently had a production of Macbeth running in the Crypt at St Andrews in Holborn. You can read their blog here. This was the first production I've seen in a long time which actually made me realise how much I miss working in the theatre. I'm looking forward to seeing the work Baz Productions make in the future.

I'm giving a paper at a conference in Ottowa next year: History, Memory, Performance. My paper will be on history, memory and storytelling in some Stephen Poliakoff dramas. I'm very excited about it, but I'm trying to pretend I don't have to fly - I'm not scared of flying I just hate it, and the cheapest flight to Ottawa is nearly 15 hours with a stop over... Maybe I could row over there or something?

The Electric Forest are fantastic light installations and walks through British forests. I'm looking forward to going to the one in Thetford Forest.

Reading Lists, libraries and beautiful books

Somebody asked me recently what books I'd read recently - I had to think about this, which is unusual as I can usually reel off quite a few without thinking at all. I read everyday, but rarely these are books anyone else would want to read - New Perspectives in Historical Writing, Probing the Limits of Representation, Practicing New Historicism, anyone? Thought not.

To add to this I've been stuck in interminable chapter writing hell since sometime in March, which finally came to an end about ten days ago, but which has meant I've not been able to read anything non-chapter related, mostly because I've just been too tired to read anything else at the end of the day.

This term though I've been teaching a course on contemporary writing, so I've been reading a book a week, and this is the reading list:

Marilynne Robinson - Home
Ali Smith - The First Person and Other Stories
Sarah Waters - The Little Stranger
Michelle Paver - Dark Matter
Jackie Kay - The Red Dust Road
Jackie Kay -Fiere
Jeanette Winterson - Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
Jose Saramargo - The Elephant's Journey
Alex Wheatle - Brenton Brown
Bel Mooney - A Small Dog Saved My Life

In the last week of term the students get to choose the book they want to read. A few of my students raised their hands 'What do we do in week 12?' questions abound. Choose a book you like and suggest it to the rest of the class. 'What?' - none of them could think of a book they had read. What did you read in the summer? Silence. You must have read something. One finally mumbled that he spent the rest of the year reading and so didn't read anything over the summer. What is he doing an English degree for if he doesn't like reading? When I finished my undergraduate degree I was so tired I couldn't read any of the books I loved or wanted to read, but I needed to read something so I trundled my way through all my Dad's crime novels. How can these students spend a whole summer not reading?

I would go crazy if I didn't or wasn't able to read - books have been there at the most difficult and terrible times and I've always used books as a way of escaping the terribleness. When I worked as a bank clerk I used to use my lunch hour to go to the library in the town (whatever town, as I was moved about a lot) where I was based and sit in there and read; it was an hour of grace day on day, week on week while I was doing a job which made me very unhappy; it got me out of the bank and effectively made the job bearable until a job I wanted to do came along. In the last month I have learned four out of the seven public libraries I used have been shut down, two have had their hours cut, and one risks closure.

The Kindle advert may be claiming the thing replaces the book (it doesn't because you can't drop in the the bath for a start, not to mention all the other things, which I won't mention otherwise I will be ranting) but I cannot replace the library: the experience of going into a place filled with books, pulling something off the shelf at random and starting the reading journey. Or going into a library with the reading list for your course and looking at the shelves and pulling books off to find which ones you need, which are interesting or helpful, and which are no good and can go back on the shelf. The rejection process in the academic library is as important as the act of discovery. 

I haven't managed to finish AL Kennedy's The Blue Book - I was just too tired and couldn't actually hold the book upright in bed, and decided the book and I would be much happier if we left each other alone for a while. I'll be reading it at Christmas though and I still love looking at it in all its blueness on my shelf. Slight aside - there seems to be a small trend at Vintage/Jonathan Cape at the moment to publish books which have the ends of the pages the same colour as the cover - Julian Barnes' Booker winner has a black hardcover with the ends of the pages also black, and the edges of the dust jacket also black so it sort of melds, the new Vintage edition of Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit is very orange in the same way that The Blue Book is blue. I wonder if the rise of the Kindle (how much do I hate that TV advert? More than the actual Kindle I think) and the iPad and other assorted e-reader things, has meant that publishers are trying to make (some) effort to produce hardback editions which look beautiful.

After I escaped chapter hell, I started reading Sara Wheeler's wonderful book Terra Incognita, which is about her travels in Antarctica. This is the first non-work book I've read since sometime in the spring. I've never read much travel writing before - there is so much fiction I haven't read, not to mention the poetry, that non-fiction - unless it is really vital and essential - tends to slightly fall off my radar. But this year I started to give in to my desire to read books about the Arctic and Antarctica, starting safely with a travel book about Norway, where I turned immediately to the bit about the Arctic Circle, and then picked up a copy of a novel called The Still Point whilst traveling to a conference in Exeter which I read in huge gulps on the train there and back, along with an article about the Northern Lights in the Saturday Guardian Magazine someone had left on the seat of the train from Exeter. Chapter hell began, along with some other awful things and my snow and ice filled reading dreams had to wait; I'm back there now and loving it.

I'm off to jump down another chapter black hole - I may be some time.

In Search of the Perfect Notebook

It seems many people who need to use, or want to use, notebooks - I mean the paper kind not the computers - is not really satisfied with the one they have got, and are therefore always in search of one which is better suited to what they want. I am no different. I wrote a few months ago about the notebooks I need to use - of all the notebooks listed the most important notebook I use on a daily basis is the one for my PhD research.
My requirements are: A5, casebound in a hardback cover, good quality paper which takes fountain pen ink and pencil well, I need lined pages, the notebook must lie flat when opened, and for bizarre reasons know only to myself and my archiving needs, the notebook must have a red cover.
I have tried making my notes directly onto my laptop but this just does not work for me - I need the feeling of pen or pencil on paper to process my thoughts - so I use the notebooks. I am currently using a WH Smith own brand notebook, which is ok, but the paper is not as good as I would like - some inks feather and bleed on it - but it does its job in most cases, but I'm still on the search for a better notebook, and I'm not that keen on the shade of red.
Over the last few weeks I've been writing the third chapter of my PhD, and I expect this notebook will be used up in the next few days as I struggle - and this chapter really has been a struggle - to finish the first draft. This academic year has been difficult for so many reasons and this chapter should have been completed some months ago. This time last year I was on target, now I feel horribly behind. I am having to write huge stretches of the chapter longhand before typing them up because I cannot seem to be able to work out what I want to write on the screen. This is both time and notebook consuming.
After I finish this notebook I will use up the few remaining pages in my Seawhite of Brighton notebook, which I stopped using when I realised how much I need lines. It is actually a sketch book because Seawhite of Brighton are an art supply company; it is a great notebook, I like the cover, and I like the thick pages, but I really do need lines. So I need to find something else.
I know all the paper aficianados out there are shouting 'Clairefontaine', but have you seen the price? I go through these notebooks too quickly to justify spending over £7 per notebook, and although I agree the paper is great for fountain pens, I do find the ink takes a bit too long to dry on this paper - and if my thoughts are flowing I need to get them down and keep going, not wait while the page dries before turning it.
Yesterday I discovered I did once have the perfect notebook. Searching through a pile of Poliakoff plays I found one of my old notebooks from my MA. It seems I filled this book up with terrifying speed in the British Library whilst doing some research on Irish writers broadcasting on the Third Programme in the late 1940s and early 1950s: it is full of pencil scribbles about dates and times and content of broadcasts made by Irish writers, copied from piles and piles of archive copies of the Radio Times. I flicked through the notebook and realised what a good book it was - the paper was smooth but not slick, it had lines, the cover was a nice shade of red and had a smooth texture, it opened flat. I'd only written in it in pencil (pens are banned in the BL) so I needed to find out if the paper was up to the worst behaving inks I own. I found a page  with a small amount of space took it to my desk and tried the inks.
It was perfect. But where on earth did I buy it? There is no brand or identifying marks on the cover. Are they still made? The search begins...