ECLECTIC PROJECTS BLOG

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 in the hours before the university library’s closed down over the holidays (long story). Realised today that I don’t have the books on Bahktin that I wanted, but they’re local to Nathan campus so it’s not a huge problem; also looking at grabbing some secondary texts while I’m there, since there’s a bunch of interesting genre theory being utilized in some of the research I revisited today and I’m interested enough to go seek it out and give it a once-over. This visiting the library thing is looking more and

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, so the temptation to waste time is high (yes, I know, I’m blogging and wasting time; shut up. Right now I’m angry with myself and my thesis – it’s the kind of mood that leads to beating people to death with their own shoes if they give me another outlet for the rage…). And I’m wondering if another trip to the library is in order, now that they’ve re-opened from the summer hiatus…

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” segments from Dungeons and Dragons and Vampire since they’re the only narrative forms I know that explain how the genre works before setting you loose on the narrative. Still not one hundred percent sure what I’m aiming for in this section, but I’ve got that circling-around-the-point feeling fired up and past experience says it’s usually a little easier to hit the individual segments rather than the overall theme. I figure, if I can just get another five-hundred words down before heading out to my mother’s birthday dinner, I should be

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 like television and film spent their formative years mimicking the trappings of theater because no-one had really pushed the boundaries of what the mediums could do, most of the sample exegetical work for PhD’s out there read much like a traditional thesis in a truncated form. If you don’t want to do that (and, given the general “genre’s are slippery” theme of my thesis, it’d feel odd to do so) you’re kind of left to make it up as you go along with only a vague kind of outline; basically,