Happy Days

Yesterday I had an impromptu meeting with my poor PhD supervisor. She is wonderful. She sits and listens to me while I snivel on and on about how hard it all is, and then nods in appreciation. "It is, it is," she says. She passes me hankies at appropriate moments, and doesn't try to fix anything. She just listens, and sometimes, all you need is a good listen. I told her the Joyce story. She liked that. I tried not to swear too much - I'm going to have to start telling people I've got Tourette's!

Today I wrote 500 words, and didn't give myself a hard time over them either. I wanted to write more, but it wouldn't come, but you know what... it's okay.

I went to aqua aerobics too, and then took miss 7 year old swimming - and she learned to swim! Hurrah! It wasn't me who helped of course, but my friend's kids, but hell, what joy!

And when I got home, I have an invite from Caroline to her launch for In Search of Adam, and it's in the evening, so I can actually make it! How fab is that!

And all the marking is done. And I feel... so relieved... and free...

All in all, happy days!

PhDs, habits, and horse shoes

Apologies for the sickly moans and complaints of earlier posts - I am just struggling a bit. I'm doing a PhD for chrissake. Apparently, I am assured, this is normal. You see it is all a bit of a roller coaster - and I don't like roller coasters very much. Not even little ones like the one John Ivers has built in his garden (see below).

Homemade Roller Coaster

So it's about improving one's mental habits, and habits take a long time to develop. It takes time to carve behaviours into our psyches - long hours of soul searching and worry, of telling ourselves repeatedly how crap we really are - letting the demons win. Like smoking. Long hours of coughing and spluttering and feeling decidedly green before eventually it tastes quite good, and before long you can't live without it. But habit forming can also be a solution and a cure.

Henry David Thoreau, who was always rather good at coming up aphorisms, puts it like this;

As a single footstep will not make a path on the earth, so a single thought will not make a pathway in the mind.
To make a deep physical path, we walk again and again.
To make a deep mental path, we must think over and over the kind of thoughts we wish to dominate our lives.

So I am going to work really hard on all these new habits, like getting up and having breakfast instead of smoking three cigs and drinking 6 cups of tea. I am going to write and not look at it, because after three months in a drawer, it isn't half as bad as I remembered.

I am going to tell myself that doing a PhD is a bitch, and if it weren't, if it were easy, everyone would have one. And that if writing novels were easy, everyone would also be a published author instead of just telling me at parties, that they too, have a book in them! And I am going to tell myself that if I must insist on being such a pain in the ass as to want to try to do both a PhD AND a novel in one hit, then I must stop crying and whinging about it, and crack on! Without nicotine.

Which - if you are still with me, leads to the happy stuff that's been going on in my life!

1. Finished the marking for this semester - YAY - YIPPEE - what a load off!
2. Finally cracked the canter transition and am riding better and better.
3. My little one got to meet the farrier and see how a horse gets its shoes put on. He also gave her a shoe to keep (which is sitting on my desk).



4. We put the trampoline up. A good bounce does wonders for the soul!


Does my bum look big like this?!

5. I haven't smoked for THREE WHOLE WEEKS and have been exercising! No wonder I am so crabby! But there is life after tobacco, and the cravings have stopped. I used to smoke and write, you see. The two went together so well, and I daren't replace the fags with a glass of wine or I'll end up in rehab quicker than you can say Chardonnay - those north American genes don't respond well to fire water you see.

A Little Light Reading for The Weekend, Madam?

The interested out there will note that my word count has not budged this week - but all is not lost. You see I've been working on an application for PhD funding which means I've had to condense around 6,000 words into the space of 500. And I'm tired. Really tired.

I started it a couple of weeks ago and by Friday evening was in tears, surrounded by over 30 books and the same number of Journal Articles. By Saturday I'd narrowed it down to the texts in the pic, plus half of the articles, and gone through half a forest scrawling the words, "My research project will..." followed by lots of gobbledegook and ending with expletives. So instead of taking the kids out (like I promised) and doing the shopping, housework etc., I sat in the office screaming at the walls and writing lots more rubbish until 2 am, and then started again at 8 am Sunday. I finally finished it by 4 pm. Hurrah! It's probably crap. Argh!

The good thing about this exercise is that it's made me have to think about my novel in a gargantuan amount of depth. I know what the novel is about, and I know how I'm going to put it together, but how do you explain it in a few lines? I've also had to think about how my novel is original, and how it fits in with the rest of the literary genre I'm writing in, not to mention show the research I've done so far. It was like trying to fit a giraffe into a tea-pot.

But it's done now, and I can finish my marking and get on with some writing again. Hopefully the kids will forgive me for working all weekend, again.

The Books

- I don't know why Morrison's Beloved is in there - must have got scraped up! It should be Erdrich's Love Medicine

- Dictionary and Thesaurus for double checking and word reduction.

- Derrida and Kristeva are heavy going but fascinating if you want to tie your brain in knots.

- Same for the Postmodernism.

- Allende is wonderful - I recommend her autobiography to anyone who is suffering from cultural plurality!

- Cuentos Andaluces is a recent acquisition and most enjoyable despite the fact I have to keep looking words up. Mind you, I have to look words up for Kristeva and Derrida too, and they're in English!

- Cixous is a must for anyone interested in writing processes and languages.

Feel free to ask about any of the others! I expect to be inundated... not!

PDP Heaven or Hell?!

I have a meeting coming up with my PhD supervisor, so have spent the morning working on my PDP (Personal Development Portfolio). The PDP is designed to make you think about your progress, how knowledge and skills are developing and so on and so forth... for 27 pages! I realised with horror that I hadn't updated mine since March 2006.

For many a PDP is just more administrational clap-trap, more hoops to negotiate, but surprisingly I've found some of it quite useful. Having to update it has meant I've had to dig out all my old paperwork, and think about just how exactly, I have (if I have) developed in the following areas:

1. Personal and Generic Skills Audit {Aw... do I really have to fill this in?!}
2. Research Environment {Yup, I'm researching all right}
3. Research Management {I'm dead organised, me!}
4. Personal Effectiveness {It starts with Demonstrate a willingness and ability to learn and acquire knowledge One would hope so at PhD level!}
5. Communication Skills {I'd be a bit snookered as a teacher without these, eh}
6. Networking and Team Work {I wonder if our novel race counts?!}
7. Career Management {I think I'd like to look after horses one day, in France...}
8. Other Skills as identified by you or your supervisor {like there's anything left to add after 25 pages of questions!}

The useful part was the bit at the beginning that asks what you've been doing since you last filled it in, and I was surprised to find I've done rather a lot that I'd forgotten about. Yay!

As for the novel writing itself, I thought I hadn't done any work, and yet it's taken me 4 hours to sort through all the handwritten materials I've been gathering and consigning to a big box under my desk. I found tons of my original ideas and thoughts, not to mention reams of snippets of fiction, of characterisation, of key events, and research I've already done.

So I'm feeling rather smug (bearing in mind that life can, and often does, go tits-up at any given time). Last week I wrote 10,000 words, swam 20 lengths (that's a lot for me!), had a marvellous riding lesson, and managed to have everyone fed/clothes washed/house sorted/shopping done without too much screaming and shouting!

This more than makes up for the fact that the first 10,000 words of my novel are probably not going to be used now, at least not in their current form. And that my word count progress is probably going to be slowed to taking a new approach to the project as a whole. Argh!