28 Days of Thesis Updates

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 in pretty good shape to do some heavy-lifting on the wordcount tomorrow.