A writer's life for me

I just emailed the third draft of my creative thesis to my primary and secondary supervisors, two friends from my PhD cohort, and I’ve uploaded a draft to my Kindle for my other half to read. I’ve hit upon the usual feelings that you face when finishing and distributing a new draft, I think. Blind panic, genuine disbelief, and this horrendous, horrendous feeling of waking up in the morning and simply not knowing what to do with my time (the answer, of course, is go back to researching my critical accompaniment, but we’ll just leave a pin in that for now). The drafting process has been troublesome up to this point – as regular readers of these self-indulgent rants will already know – although I have developed a divide and conquer approach to editing that has carried me through with minimal discomfort (or maybe that’s hindsight softening the pain). The third draft, though, well that’s been a different beast altogether. In turns out that the reason the third draft has been su...

Warning: Here there be spoilers and curse words.  L.S. Hilton’s Maestra, published earlier this year, was one of those books that I didn’t think had annoyed me – until I started to talk about it. I briefly reviewed it earlier today for my website ( www.madhatterreviews.co.uk ) and found myself torn between saying how much I enjoyed it – which I really think I did – and saying how much it annoyed me – which I really think it did. The novel itself isn’t the issue, as such, and by that I mean it’s perfectly fine in terms of how it’s written and even the plot is mostly okay – my issue is actually with the main character, Judith, and Hilton’s treatment of her. When my other half asked what I thought of this book, I said: ‘It’s okay, but I’d like a chat with the author, I think.’ ‘Why?’ he replied. ‘Because I’d like to know what her intentions were with the main character.’ It was an accidentally stiff response, but that’s what my issue boils down to. Judith is a s...

We are, after much feet-dragging and time-wasting on my part, officially in third draft territory... And even though it’s 12:24pm and I just answered the front door, still wearing my pyjamas with, as it turns out, one or two ink-stains around my mouth from anxiously chewing at my scribble-pen so much, I feel like I’m in pretty good shape. Although I can see why that opening description might make you think otherwise – and I can fully understand the postman’s, ‘Oh,’ when he looked up and saw me. For a second I thought I should probably explain myself but I landed torn between, ‘Sorry, I’m doing a PhD,’ and, ‘Sorry, I’m having a minor breakdown,’ because the two things feel somewhat synonymous at the moment. Instead, I opted for a, ‘Thanks, have a good day,’ which seemed just about normal enough to redeem me from my tartan attire. So here we are, third draft territory. It’s not a bad place, really. In fact much of my time here is made up of drinking tea, eating crumpets, and...

Friends, Romans, readers: You have missed a lot. In my head I had been updating this fairly regularly; I see now that I haven’t actually posted anything since the back-end of July, and since then I have – believe it or not – gone through a monumental spin on the PhD wheel. This spin, though, actually saw me fall in love with my research while I started to heavily resent my creative thesis – in a (half-)surprising turn of events. Only half-, though, given that on average PhD students seem to move between loving and loathing what they are doing between three and twenty-eight times a week - so perhaps one spin on the PhD wheel is a huge understatement. Earlier this week, I still firmly hated my creative thesis. I had submitted a draft to my supervisor at the start of the summer so that I could spend time working on my research paper in the months that followed - and I did, rather successfully. I spent most of my summer, in fact, buried beneath mountains of research. I read, I scribbl...

Separation Anxiety is defined as ‘anxiety provoked in a young child by separation or threat of separation from its mother or main carer’. Writing as someone who has just submitted the second draft of their creative thesis to their supervisor – still 18,000 words shy of the length it should be, might I add – I feel like I’m currently in a steady position to widen that definition – or at the very least, add an alternative meaning to it, perhaps. Separation Anxiety (2): The feeling experienced by tortured creative types on distributing their work to a group of people who aren’t morally obligated to care about their feelings, and will therefore give them (brutally) honest feedback on their submission. When you look at it that way, I think the anxiety I’m feeling right now is legitimate. Entirely useless and fairly debilitating when it comes to establishing a proper work regime for the remaining chunk of my thesis, which I still haven’t written. But legitimate, nevertheless. ...

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...