Who I am... at the minute, anyway.

I’m currently doing a Masters degree in Creative Writing and, since beginning that degree, I’ve been asked more than once to have a think about what type of writer I am, what type of writer I want to be, will be, could be, should be… it never ends. I appreciate that I sound somewhat ground down by these considerations but truthfully, I’ve actually quite enjoyed it. I got into the habit of reading about writing, and sometimes writing about writing, and discovered that it’s not as bad as some people make it out to be. This morning I settled down to write a blog post, which is due to be published to my review website at some point tomorrow (although, it will probably be published here now, too), and in that blog post I just talked about writing. What I’m working on, why I write, how I write - and I bloody loved it! So I thought that maybe, writing about writing is writing worth doing, particularly if it’s something that I enjoy, and something that will ultimately help me to understand my writing and the processes I go through when it comes to producing it.

For anyone hopefully looking at their computer screens, buzzing with the excitement that perhaps this random stranger, communicating with you through the beauty of the internet, is about to share a bunch of secrets that will somehow unlock the secret to your writing… then you’re wrong. And I’m sorry about that. Maybe people will read this and it will spark something for you and if it does then that’s brilliant, but it’s also entirely accidental. In a growing world of online writers, including people who make a career from this vocation without even leaving the comfort of their home - dream job or what - then it seemed worth delving back into blogging, if for no other reason than I thought I might be missing out on something brilliant. And I suppose time will tell whether that’s actually true or not.

The blog will mostly consist of prose writing, although please don’t be too alarmed or unsettled if the occasional bit of poetry appears at some point. All poems will be vetted thoroughly before being made public; please approach with caution, try not to startle them, and everyone should be okay.

C x

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The Diary of a Whatever I Am Now: Transition period.

Transition: 'the process or the period of changing from one state or condition to another'. I wanted to make this blog more of a regular thing once my PhD was over, for several reasons. Partly it’s just to log what happens next and this, in itself, is two-fold: I want to have some kind of documentation of this recovery process (yes, that’s what I’m calling it) that follows the PhD, but I also live in hope that someone who is struggling with having finished their PhD might find this blog some day, and breathe a hefty sigh on realising that the weird grief-cum-relief they’re feeling right now isn’t totally abnormal – in fact, it might even be quite common. I also want to get into the habit of writing more – something I’m encouraging my own students to do now and I hate giving out writing advice that I haven’t/am not taking myself, and so here we are. This is my first post as a Whatever I Am Now (because I still don’t have balls big enough to write The Diary of a Writer in th...

The Diary of a PhD Student: New year, same PhD.

Do you remember when these blog posts were all about emotional breakdowns and panic attacks? Don’t worry; I’m sure there are more to come. But, over the Christmas period, I seem to have had something that feels akin to an epiphany when it comes to my PhD – or more specifically, these final months of it. Three years ago I had all the time in the world to finish this degree; now I have around six months. That’s a self-imposed deadline, negotiated, somewhat optimistically perhaps, between my supervisor and myself – I can take more time if I really need it – but I also know that now I have June in mind for my submission, June is the cut off. And so somehow, my three years equals a lifetime theory has gone out of the window entirely, with those three years having been whittled down to just six months. In my last post I reported back a little conversation I had with my second supervisor during our pre-Christmas catch-up, where she told me how important it is to enjoy the next few months...

The Diary of a Whatever I Am Now: Corrupted Hard Drive.

Take a walk with me. We’ll go back to August 2010, late August, when I finally found out that despite my below par A-Level grades, there was a university in the country that was prepared to give me a chance. Praise be to them. Ahead of starting this journey, my generous mother bought me a laptop. A brand spanking new laptop. That my kind and patient sister, and her partner, set up for me and taught me how to use. They deliberately picked something that would suit the university life style – and they were bang on the money in that respect. That laptop lasted I-don’t-care-to-remember how many assignments and a 10,000 word undergraduate dissertation. Let’s not forget, either, that during my first and second summers home from university, I also wrote two “novels” (I use that word in a bland and unimpressed tone, incidentally) that were typed on that same laptop. From there, we moved to postgraduate studies. More assignments and eventually a 25,000 word dissertation. By this point ...

A writer's life for me

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