The Diary of a Phd Student: Well, I'm still here.

It’s a teenie, tiny, I’m between things on my to-do list and I really should be doing other work right now, sort of update this time. After my recent editing-inspired-meltdown, it seemed like it would be worth checking in with anyone reading to assure them that a) I am perfectly fine and b) I have been through the first and second rounds of feedback provided by my supervisors, and everything is okay. I mean, I’ll be working 12 – 18 hour days forever, but apart from that everything is definitely okay.

I have a surprisingly manageable shopping list in terms of what needs to be addressed and edited in the second draft of my book/creative element and – if I’m being brutally honest with myself – as yet no one has given me feedback that I haven’t agreed with on some level. There are pacing issues galore and there are about a thousand missed opportunities for making the book richer – in terms of plot and character – than it currently stands.

The critic has taken over now – as if the critic operates as an entirely separate entity inside my writer’s brain – and frankly told the writer, ‘You can do better than this, you know?’

‘Yes, I know,’ said the writer.

And here we are.

The baby steps forward that I’ll be taking over the coming weeks will be to draw up a timeline of my book, as it stands, and then draw up a timeline of my book as I want it to stand. The first steps to fixing a problem are identifying chiefly that a problem exists, and then identifying specifically what the problem actually is – perhaps a slight bastardisation of an old adage, but it certainly works this way when it comes to editing a book.

With that said, if anyone needs me then I’ll be hiding under sheets of A3 paper surrounded by highlighters and two heavily annotated copies of my manuscript – probably trying to work out which piece of action belongs to which chapter, and which chapter belongs in the bin.

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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 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 ...

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...

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