A writer's life for me

Some basic facts... The creative element of my PhD thesis needs to be 80,000 words. The first draft of my creative element was just over 94,000 words. The advice that followed this was, naturally, to be harsh on myself with line edits and general edits that would shape the second draft of the manuscript, and would subsequently lower the word count of the book as a whole. And the final fun fact... My second draft is now 18,500 words shy of the length that it needs to be. I have simultaneously taken one step forward and nearly 20,000 steps back and so I’m doing the only logical thing I can think to do at this stage – I’m walking away. Hands flat and raised, panic at a steady rise, I have ‘finished’ the first round of the second draft of my manuscript and I am backing away slowly, for at least a week, maybe even longer. So for anyone who follows me on one social media channel or another, if you see anything to suggest that I’m tinkering with that damn book again, ...

Earlier this week my protagonist stopped talking to me. It’s not as mad as it sounds – I promise – but there really is no other way to describe what happened. I was working on a chapter, or rather a section of a chapter, which saw my protagonist interact via a series of text messages with another character – and it just wasn’t working. I pushed and shoved and wrote and rewrote. It could have been writer’s block – whatever that means, if such a thing even exists – but something about this felt personal. I looked to my protagonist for an answer and found her faced away from me, arms folded, foot tapping on the floor as if to say, ‘Well if you don’t know, I’m not going to tell you.’ So I did the only logical thing that I could think of. I packed up my protagonist, took her into town, and we had a catch up over a cup of tea. I’m not really helping the ‘It’s not as mad as it sounds’ argument there, am I? Hear me out, though... When I wrote the first draft of my PhD book, I...

There is a delicious irony hidden somewhere in the fact that my last PhD-related blog post loosely promised that I was getting better at blogging, having released two updates in two weeks... The irony being that I made that statement nearly two months ago and, since then, my blog has been a PhD-free zone. So, maybe I’m not as good as I thought I was. Or maybe I’ve been having a PhD-wobble, of sorts, which is something – I hope/think/know – the majority of fellow students and writers alike will be able to empathise with. And it surely, hopefully, must, go some way towards explaining my lack of updates over the past few weeks. Now I’m looking back over my last blog post – where I detailed the beginnings of an editing process that I at the time felt quite proud of – and I’m thinking: ‘Ugh, how stupid you were to be so goddamn positive about this whole mess.’ But I’m having to shout these words quite loudly to myself on account of being so deeply buried beneath the ongoing secon...