hmpf

- The title does not accurately describe the content.

- The attempt at contextualisation is rubbish. I'm making a lot of words while saying very little that's actually useful to someone who really doesn't know the field(s). It's essentially name dropping without (most of) the names – saying “I know this and this and this sub-section of literature/society/... exists,” but not saying anything beyond that.

- The chapter on the comic's publishing history and the attempt to give a short overview of general themes etc. is too short, and doesn't have the right kind of information, and is thus sort of useless.

- The terms of the discussion are not properly defined.

- The main part of the discussion does not follow a consistent system/structure. There are three sub-sections that each have four sub-sub-sections, which makes it look as if there's some kind of system there, but there isn't. The four sub-sub-sections are not the same for each of the three sub-sections.

- Chapter 6, “Boundaries of the Human,” is not properly connected to... anything. It just kind of floats in there. It's conveniently mostly left out of the conclusion, as well, so I'm really not sure what it's doing in the thesis at all. Ah, yes. I found it too interesting to cut. That's why it's still there. But it doesn't fulfil a purpose.

- The conclusion ignores chapter 6 (see above.) Also, neither the conclusion nor the discussion preceding it manages to take a step back and look at what it all means to a reader in the context of our own society.

how many hours you can spend formatting and tweaking the Shortest Bibliography in the History of Academic Essays...

Sad fact: not enough time left now to do anything that resembles sleeping. My back is killing me already, and I have house cleaning to do today. Joy. Have to be at the copy shop at nine, i.e. in about three hours, to make four copies (I ran out of paper for the printer, so I couldn't print all the required copies at home) and have them bound, and then hand in the bloody thing [thesis advisor to Hmpf: "stop worrying about formatting and hand in the bloody thing!"] by twelve at the latest. I hopehopehope the copy shop will do the binding right away...

(I *could* actually still hand it in on Monday instead of today, but I just want to be rid of it, now.)

This may be an exceedingly stupid question, but...

if there's a sentence somewhere in my thesis that mentions that as a child I read Donald Duck and Tintin, does that constitute something that needs to be properly referenced/documented? And how in the world would one go about documenting something like that? I mean, what would be 'the' date and place of publication for Donald Duck? It's not like that's a single book, or even a single series... it's a multimedia juggernaut. Tintin isn't quite as bad, but also very difficult to document if it should be necessary, due to that passing reference, to incorporate it into the list of works cited...

Help?

although I've allegedly been 'finishing it up' for days now.

This is mainly due to the following mental process:


( Read more... )

I *should* be studying for my exams now... Instead, I'm still writing my thesis, and will be for another week or two. *sigh*

Well. At least now I know what it feels like to write nearly 40,000 words in eight weeks. Wish I could do the same in fanfic someday...

Though, I have to say, it's one of the big victories of the last six months that I actually *did* keep writing fic through most of that time. Not much, and most of it bad, and none of it finished (except for the deliberately bad one I posted a while ago, which was barely written, really, so much as channelled) - but, I did write at least a little bit, most weeks.

My LoM obsession is dying down now, I think. Which isn't really surprising - it started in 2006, so it's been nearly three years now. That's about the normal time for the 'hot' phase of a fannish obsession, with me. Which means that - if this latest fannish obsession of mine follows the patterns established by previous ones - now come the good times for writing fic. In the 'hot' phase I'm mostly too busy consuming other fen's fannish products (fic, vids etc.), discussing, and randomly fantasising (i.e. 'mindficcing', i.e. idly playing with vague fic ideas that are mostly too crap to turn into actual fic, but fun to mentally play with a bit.) Once the immediate appeal of these kinds of activities disappears I tend to shift my fannish attentions almost entirely to writing fic for the next several years. Most of my better fic in my other fandoms was written after the 'hot' phases of those respective fannish obsessions. So, I hope that - once the dratted thesis and exams are out of the way - you'll see increased LoM ficcing activity from me this year.

Because three weeks before the end of your thesis writing period is exactly the right time to start a new fannish project. Of course. *g*

But first, status updates:

1.) I'm still anti-social, i.e. not properly reacting to e-mail etc.
2.) I'm still mostly cut off from the internet, i.e. staying at my parents'.
3.) Current thesis length: 52 pages. With my planned total of 80, this would mean I'd be about two thirds done. Sadly, it's looking like the thesis will end up much longer than planned, so it's more like half done; possibly not even that. I'm also badly stuck in a number of places, and have absolutely no faith at all in the parts that I *have* finished. It's all a load of very shallow blah-blah.

*

Right. Now for the new project:

http://fs_10percent.livejournal.com/

Statement of purpose: http://fs-10percent.livejournal.com/730.html
Declaration of biases: http://fs-10percent.livejournal.com/770.html
First rec: http://fs-10percent.livejournal.com/1096.html

Why now, of all times? Because I'm watching loads of vids in the breaks between bouts of writing, and it's actually kind of relaxing to write up a mini-review/rec every once in a while. Gets the fannish juices going; makes me feel good. I need that, right now.

*

You may also expect embarrassing fic of me in the next few days.

the thesis is still an absolute nightmare, and apparently my brain thinks that's the perfect situation to start churning out fic like it's a goddamn ficcing machine. I wrote a whole!!! story!!! in only four days!!! That's 1,500 words, and it's still only a draft, but normally with me, even drafts take years. *boggles at self* (And don't worry, ommadon, I only did this after I'd done my daily eight or more hours of work on the thesis.)

Mind you, it's not very good - though part of the lack of quality is kind of deliberate.

It's fic based on fic, no less. I've sort of adopted Mikey's Undercover universe as a kind of sub-fandom, it seems. And thus I have now written Undercover fanfic. Which means I have technically written LoM slash - the last kind of slash in the entire universe that I could imagine writing. *boggles some more*

Also, I just made the mistake of taking a look at metafandom, the first in a long while, and I found YAFD (Yet Another Feedback Discussion), mainly about feedback for fic fests and holiday exchanges and the like. And I remember this kind of discussion and this kind of angst from previous years, and even from the time when I still participated in fic-fests-avant-la-lettre (my last such participation was in 2003, I think.) And I have to wonder: why *do* people participate in fic fests and holiday exchanges and the like? Because as far as I can see,

- they cause a lot of feedback angst, both among the writers, who feel depressed if they get less feedback than others who participated in the same event, and among the readers, who feel they need to give feedback to - ideally - everyone involved, which means reading, and thinking about, and finding something to say about dozens of fics;
- in the case of holiday fests and exchanges, they put considerable additional stress on people in an already stressful situation;
- and (all right, I can really only speak for myself here, as this is not a complaint I've heard often from others) very often the resulting fics are less than satisfactory, because sometimes you get a prompt that just doesn't work for you, and generally speaking you can't give the story the time it needs.

So. What's the appeal?

(I know that, when I still participated, I mostly did it because it seemed to be what people *did.* Peer pressure, if you will, although there wasn't really any pressure. I just drifted with the crowd. And I liked that it made me actually finish something for a change. Then I realised that, even if it did undeniably make me finish things, I was never *happy* with the things it made me finish. So that was when I decided to stop.)

Right. Back to the thesis now. But, err, feel free to discuss amongst yourselves. And I may drop in again later, maybe. ;-)

Shit.

if I can't even bring myself to open the frelling document before it's three a.m. and I have exhausted every other possibility of entertainment? I sort of sit at the computer all day, with the thesis folder open in the task bar as if I'm *just* about to open a file, and read the Engrish blog, and Cute Overload, and boingboing, and I Can Has Cheezburger, and half a dozen eco sites, and basically every timewaster site there is on the net. I'm not even writing fic, or spamming Mikey with comments anymore, which was at least a sort-of-useful form of procrastination... I'm really just killing time - when time is the last thing I can afford to lose.

Needless to say, my sleep rhythm is completely out of whack again, too. And I'm totally panicking at the thought of next week, which is a week where I have four hour shifts instead of my usual two hours, and those four hour shifts involve a type of work that does not really allow you to write 'on the side', as the two hour shifts usually do. Basically, I'll be at work all day (or what constitutes 'all day' if your regular day is only five hours long because your sleep pattern is fucked up) and only get home at about ten in the evening, probably somewhat exhausted, and then I'll have to make dinner and stuff, and *then*, at eleven in the evening or so, I will be able to start working. If I'm still able to work then, that is.

Actually, the more I consider this, the more sense it makes to just give in to my bizarre sleep rhythm and redefine three p.m. as 'morning,' at least for the next week, and possibly for the rest of the writing phase. That way, I'd get to go to work about two hours after waking up next week, and would have the entire night 'day' left for working on my thesis. I could go to sleep at, say, eight a.m. or so? One thing that really fucks me up at the moment is trying to fight my sick sleep pattern all the time. See, normally - I mean, 'normally' for a value of 'normal' that includes my current severe sleep problem - I'd probably go to bed after posting this - i.e. at a quarter to four a.m. or so. And then I'd spend several hours in bed trying to go to sleep - probably until around eight or so in the morning. And then I'd sleep until my alarm clock would wake me up for the first time - and because I'm constantly fighting my sleep rhythm, that would probably be at eleven or so, after only three hours of sleep. So of course I'd go to sleep again after the alarm rang. And probably sleep until the early afternoon.

I may as well give up on the pretense of being able to sleep before eight if I go to bed by four, and just *work* till eight; actually get a few pages of writing done.

Oh fuck. I forgot that I actually have to work early on Tuesday and Thursday. *sigh* There goes that plan.

Though I suppose I could go to sleep *after* work on those days.

That would be at about half past eleven in the morning. So... if I get up at half past four in the afternoon to go to work, that'd still be about five hours of sleep.

Hey, why don't I just stop sleeping altogether?

*groan*

I can haz normal sleep pattern, plz? I'm not exactly the most efficient person at the best of times, but this? This is just screwing me up in so many ways, and it exacerbates the writer's block-induced inefficiency like nobody's business.

(Filename is now: Frankensteins_thesis.odt, because I've begun patching my various truncated attempts at introductions and whatnot together. So far, it's fifteen pages of fail.)

I have five pages of one useless attempt at an introduction, three pages of another attempt, and two pages of yet another. I also have five pages of notes and some actual bits of more or less coherent text about gender.

Any time I look at any part of all this, it's like my brain grinds to a complete halt and there's just... absolutely nothing. Can't even patch the notes on gender together to form anything resembling a text.

Two and a half months to go. If I had a concept, and managed write about one page per day, it would still be doable, though only barely.

But I still don't even have a concept.

In a couple of weeks, it will officially be undoable, as I have never in my life managed to write more than one page per day, so there's no way in hell I'm going to be able to write 60-80 pages in a space of less than two months.

Of course, there's still the option of getting the two month extension of the deadline, and sort of betting on the not-too-unlikely chance that by the end of that time I'll have some sort of breakdown so I can have a doctor excuse me from taking the final exams practically without preparation nearly immediately after handing in the thesis. Thankfully, my psyche is fairly reliable in its lack of resilience to stress, so it really isn't a very large bet to take. If I need to take the extension option, it's almost guaranteed I'll get ill. (Well, it's kind of almost guaranteed anyway, really, tbh. January will be hell, if I keep aiming for the January 30 deadline.)