Author: PeterMBall

The downside of yesterday: the writing went to hell and I started waffling again. This drives me crazy, so I stopped and thought about ways to get around it; the new plan for today is to try short, controlled bursts of wordage written over a half-hour to an hour with two-hour gaps between in which the research is pulled together. The upside of yesterday: was finally getting books from the library. And eating cereal for dinner. And the air-conditioner, which saved my bacon when I got back from the library and realised it was 36 degrees inside my office at 4pm in the afternoon.

Yesterday was all about the doubt; lots of wondering whether what I’d written the day before was worthwhile and if I should continue in the direction I was going. Previously that led to massive cuts in word-count as I tried to clarify things; yesterday I just bulldozed forward and kept doing what I’m doing. Probably a good sign that it is working, on some level, unlike the other stuff. Or the panic is starting to become a productive force in terms of drafting, rather than a hindrance. Still, yesterday was slow, and I kind of argued myself into a corner as I pulled apart the idea of genre and exegesis. Not an inescapable corner, but one that stopped me cold at 3 am when my brain couldn’t quite figure out what happened next. Finished the day about 300 words under where I needed to be to ensure a January 31st wrap-up, but that’s not an insurmountable problem yet, just as

So yesterday was the most solid day of work on the exegesis I’ve had, clocking up over a thousand words and setting up something that actually resembles a segment rather than random ideas that I’m struggling to link together. Basically I’ve been doing in the exegesis a more detailed version of what I did in the first two days here (pull apart the idea of the exegesis itself) and things just started falling into place; huzzah for blogging, without which I’d have never realised that this is what was interesting me and stopping me from going forward. And while I’m still dreadfully behind based on when I started the process, I’m now on-par as far as wordcount goes (assuming a January 31st finish for the draft), even with the massive cuts of day 3. This is calming news. I’m due a trip to the library to grab a bunch of books, since the haul I’ve got here was grabbed haphazardly

It’s six o’clock. I wrote 1200 words today. Clean words. Nice words. Usable words. About a thousand of them are even in consecutive order. It’s the first time since I started this whole damned project that I’ve actually hit the word-count I needed to hit on a given day. In short, there will be no angst when I write my day 4 report tomorrow. But I still want to sit down and work on a short story instead of continuing with this.

Yesterday was not good on the writing front. It basically consisted of one long, mild tantrum;  a break in the middle for present wrapping and my mum’s birthday dinner; then another long tantrum that escalated as I got tired, until I hit the point where I was tempted to throw my laptop through a wall. Sometime around four a.m. I closed a file containing my exegesis draft, now another thousand words shorter than I started with, and went to bed to not-sleep for about six hours. Not, overall, my finest hour. Or sequence of hours. On the plus side, I have new shoes. Very, very green sneakers. And some rather nice charcoal sneakers for back-up. The challenge for today? Resist shiny things. Not easy, as just about everything is shiny at present. The Id has taken over the thought process and my brain would rather be doing just about anything rather than continuing to work on this frustrating, shitty morass of thesis,

Yesterday I spent several long hours feeling appallingly stupid before scrambling my way through about five hundred words. Still less than I need to do, and ordinarily I’d be all angsty about it, but I’m taking my wordcount where I can get it at the moment. In theory, this is the bit of the exegesis that explains what-is-genre in theoretical terms so that people aren’t left sitting there wondering what the hell I’m banging on about or confusing the fact that they’re thinking science-fiction or romance or literature kind of distinctions when I’m prone to occasionally back-tracking to short story as genre or film as genre or something along those lines. My notes say that this is the point where I’m spending some quality time with Bahktin and Todorov, but because I’m me I’ve also managed to worm in some of the personal anecdote kind of stuff I so love and quote from a few “what is a roleplaying game”

TO START, AN EXPLANATION OF WHAT THE EXEGESIS IS When you do a creative writing PhD they don’t necessarily ask you to write a thesis. Instead, they get you to write a creative project (in my case, a whopping great lot of short stories) and then write an short exegesis that serves as a kind of thesis-substitute where you do thesis-type-things such as critical analysis of the work and practice, but done with the knowledge that you’re the writer of the creative text up front and center. The irony is that no-one really knows what the boundaries are when you’re doing these yet – the idea only really started to gain traction in the last two decades or so (from what I’m seeing, anyway; the name comes from analytical studies of the bible, and they’ve been doing it for a lot while) and there are relatively sparse examples of what a good exegetical document looks like out there. And, just