I’ve spent most of the afternoon rushing around the house, MC5’s Kick Out the Jams buzzing through my head. I imagine it’s going to be something of a theme song during April – it’s certainly what I plan on listening to every morning this week (although I’ll probably cheat and cycle through the innumerable cover […]
It starts with what may well be the most dangerous question in the world right now: “So Peter, what happens after you finish your thesis?” Were I the melodramatic type, or at least the type in the mood for a different kind of melodrama than I’m running on right now, today’s entry would consist entirely of a […]
Congratulations to Elena Gleason, whose story Erased picked up the chocolate in Fantasy Magazine’s best story of 2008 reader poll. Congrats also to my Clarion South peep Michael Greenhut, whose story Watermark finished in the top-five, and thanks also to everyone who put in a vote for On the Finding of Photographs of My Former Loves – to […]
I’ve always known that my flat tends to be warmer than the outside world. Just how warm was only recently brought home to me, courtesy of a thermometer reading in my study. Today, at 4 PM when I walked it, it delighted in informing me that it was 39 degreesin my workspace at present. Have […]
Minimal writing yesterday (50 or so words), but that was intentional. While I’m still behind, I now feel like a rational human being who lives in a nice flat in which things are clean, rather than an angst-written PhD student who lives in a hovel in which dishes pile up in the sink. Some random […]
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 […]
