Once upon a time, many years ago, Peter M. Ball worked as a creative writing lecturer/tutor and studied for a PhD he never got around to finishing. Posts associated with this phase of his career are gathered together under this heading.
The difference between a good days work and a bad days work can depend entirely on how close you are to meeting a deadline.
Or, in other words, 1500 words of thesis draftage today. A month ago this would have been cause for celebration; today it is met with the soul-crushing knowledge that I haven’t yet done enough to earn myself a few hours sleep 🙂
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 you-tube clip of Pulp singing The Fear in answer to the question. It may yet come down to that – it’s been that kind of day, and The Fear is feeling very soundtrack-of-my-life right now, but with brave abandon I’m going to press on and risk letting some of the gloopy inner workings of my paranoia seep onto the web.
The answer: I don’t know. It scares the hell out of me. That’s probably why I’m procrastinating.
It’s not entirely true – I know, more or less, what I plan to start writing the day the thesis is off the plate. Hell, I know what I plan on writing for the next five years. The problem lies in my inability to conceptualise some form of support mechanism around the writing (since having a writing support system is actually one of the attractive qualities of doing a PhD). Today I’ve been distracting myself with paranoia over where I’m going to live, flitting between pleasant day-dreams about moving away from Brisbane and desperately cataloging things that can be thrown out should I find myself needing to go the cheaper option of renting someones spare room rather than keeping up a lease of my own. This has distracted me for hours. I find myself missing the relative plethora of folks willing to share a house that were around in my twenties.
In short, someone needs to ship me some torpedoes, if only so I can damn them and get on with things.
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 my surprise, it snuck into the top five as well.
The temperature seems to have dropped to reasonable levels here in Brisbane – today I walked into my office and saw the temperature was below 30 degrees for the first time in weeks. That probably explains why the last twenty-four hours have been more productive than usual, although that could also be because I’m now loaded up with projects again after giving up January to the thesis exclusively (I suspect I’m just not built for the singular focus approach, especially not when I’m fretting about the things I’m not doing. There is still thesis work to do, quite a bit of it, but I’ve hit the point where I can’t put off other stuff anymore. There is rent to pay, if nothing else, and one can only put that off for so long).
With that, I return to work, but before I go I’m going to suggest heading over to SF Signal’s recent Mind Meld featuring Advice for Writers if you haven’t seen it already. It’s a solid read, chock-full of useful things to know.