A writer's life for me

As of about half an hour ago, my PhD novel is with a wonderful collective of beta readers, and my PhD research paper – the second draft – is in the email inbox of my supervisor. Boom. I’d like to take a second here to thank all of the amazing people who offered to read the book. I put a call-out online and it didn’t for a second cross my mind that so many people would offer their time and patience towards reading this project. So many people offered, in fact, that I’ve had to turn people down and only send it to a select few – which has broken my heart a bit, I won’t lie. When the list of possible readers was edging close to twenty, I panicked and emailed my supervisor: ‘Bizarre question: How many readers is too many readers?’ It felt like I was giving him a riddle, but he understood the concern: ‘You don’t want more feedback than you can handle at this stage, and different people will approach the text differently. Maybe one or two for thing, one or two for an...

A lot has happened since I last updated this. Personally, my health got a little shaky and I had to take chunks of time away from work – which only added to the work stress, of course. Professionally – and by that I mean, PhD-lly – things are moving in a general forwards motion that everyone, including myself, feels quite happy about. And that’s always nice, right? There’s no catch 22, by the way. Things are genuinely coming together nicely and I am genuinely quite calm about it. Which is largely why I’m writing this post now rather than in a week, by which time I will no doubt be panicking about something/anything again. So to pick up where we left off: In my last blog post I said that I was going to start the read-through of the fourth/final draft of my novel. I was wrong. What I actually meant was that I was going to read the prologue and then email my supervisor to tell him I was panicking about the amendments to that troublesome plotline and that he needed to tell me what...