Wednesday 31 August 2011

Chapters Galore

The writing splurge continued beyond last week's blog post, allowing me to reach the new designated end-point for the second version of my dissertation.  This end-point came after rather more chapters than I'd originally intended, meaning that it's quite possible that my dissertation will be made up entirely of material written this month.

And so all the chapters I wrote back in June/July are feeling all gloomy and neglected because I'm all excited about my shiny new chapters from this past week or so.  This will presumably be the state of affairs until my dissertation supervisor emails back to say 'no, I'm afraid this is all complete bollocks' (in a much politer, non-British kind of way).

Yes, shiny new chapters have been sent flying over the interwebs to my unsuspecting supervisor who will probably be unimpressed by my presenting her with almost twenty-thousand words of new material, almost completely out of the blue.  Surprise!  *Balloons*

Since sending off new-and-shiny dissertation chapters, I have written two more.  These result from the pleasant delusion that it might actually be publishable one day.

I also took a trip into uni today to use the library.  Critical research ensued, to the distant sound of some occasional but very loud burping from a different area of the library.  Quite impressive, really.  The burp volume, that is, not the research.  My research remains less than impressive because I'm not entirely sure I'm getting the right material.  My Publishing Project rationale was rather woeful and, given that it's on the same novel, I really think I ought not to use it as basis for the dissertation's essay.

Therefore, until I can get some advice from my supervisor, I shall be wading through as many texts as I can find with the word 'fantasy' in the title.  Sounds like a winner to me.

On the fiction-reading front, I have for now abandoned Andrew Neiderman's boob book and started on Cassandra Clare's City of Bones.  It comes highly recommended by Stephanie Meyer, but I'll try not to hold that against it.  Madam Meyer does, after all, like Jane Austen, so I can't utterly condemn her taste in reading.

Two chapters in and we're doing okay.  It's not quite enough to grip me but I haven't had the urge to throw it out the window.  There have been several snippets of unique and quite lovely description so I'm keeping positive - though a real determination to read it might have to wait until the writing splurge fizzles out.

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