A writer's life for me

Why are women presented in such undesirable ways in violent/crime/thriller literature?  And why am I allegedly a massive, righteous feminist for asking this question?  For anyone reading this who doesn’t know me particularly well, my research focus for my PhD is a critical discussion of how the female gender is employed and manipulated in violent literature. For anyone reading this who doesn’t follow me on Twitter (and therefore doesn’t receive my weekly updates on what book I’m reading at the moment), I’ve recently finished Philip Kerr’s A Philosophical Investigation, and in a lot of ways, it was a good book. The novel is focussed around an alternative future (or at least, it was the future at Kerr’s time of writing; if memory serves right the setting is actually 2013), in which a Lombroso-inspired programme has been set up to identify men who are predisposed to violence - this is all done in the name of avoiding future ‘gynocide’ (the murder of females).   The con...

Or, in this case, just before you start again. So I’m aware that it’s been quite a while since I updated this space and I thought that rather than let the silence linger on for another uncomfortable month, it might perhaps be a good thing for me to actually write about what’s been going on. It turns out PhD degrees are actually quite difficult. I know - who would have thought it? It also turns out that despite writing 30,000 words of the first draft of my novel, I had somehow still ended up writing my way down the wrong road. And this is where the cracks appeared. For those who aren’t familiar with the process of doing a PhD - or at least, the process at the university where I’m doing mine - during your first year you are faced with the daunting task of going through Panel. It’s terrifying; the thing of nightmares, in fact, and I can feel palpitations building at the very mention of it. It was during the first few weeks of discussing Panel that it first became clear to me that ...