So yesterday was a Nick Cave kind of day, full of bombastic self-loathing and the like. It might have gone smoother if I had realised that then, rather than this morning, and just put Henry’s Dream on repeat after posting yesterday’s entry. Instead yesterday went exactly as predicted – long periods of “I must start, […]
So, yesterday. Oh, god, let’s not talk about yesterday. It wasn’t fun. Six hundred words and some insomnia, plus some word-count related angst (goal for day ten: 11000 words; actual words written: 6101). I have that awful, loomy feeling of things piling up around me again – not just the mountain of thesis related work, […]
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 university library has a mold problem. A significant mold problem that’s led to the closing down of the stacks in the library where most of the books I need are located. Couple this with the library’s odd opening hours until the semester starts and you probably get some idea of where my time went […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
If ever there’s a good summary for why this exegesis drives me barmy, it’s this: I just wrote 1400 words of brainstorming notes *just so I could figure out* two of the points I needed to make in my exegesis. One of them, basically, comes down to “I need to explain what I mean about […]
Just got my latest creative project draft from the associate supervisor (aka our gatekeeper, since he’s the one coming at the work fresh and without two years of living with the stories). It looks like I’m correcting formatting and doing some minor line-edits, with a few spots that need a little more clarity. The rest […]
