Graduation Preparation

I printed off two copies of my MA dissertation this evening.  It's been almost a year since I handed it in for marking but I'm only now getting around to having them hard-bound to give to the university in preparation for my graduation.  It's not forgetfulness or simple laziness that has prevented me from getting it done before.  It's the sixty quid I'll never see again once it's done.  Of course this shouldn't seem such a monumental sum after paying four grand for the actual MA but considering I will usually agonise for weeks about spending a couple of quid on a book (not even an exaggeration, unfortunately) spending that amount of money has been a tough idea to deal with.

But the three-hundred-plus pages are all printed out and ready for the trip to Romsey.  We managed it with just one printer and ink cartridge this time, which feels like one heck of an achievement after the last time.  In order to hand them in the first time round I think it required three printers and various locations hunting down printer cartridges.  I'm sure I must have ranted about it on the blog at the time.  Sounds like something I'd do.

The graduation is in November and I'll have to make sure I wrap up warmly this time.  One of my main memories of my BA graduation was of being cold (not exactly a massive surprise considering I am, in the words of my father, a corpse).  I also remember not being able to hear a great deal but there's not really anything I can do about that one, other than getting some sort of ear-trumpet.  Fetching.

In other news, I've managed to finish the chapter-plan for the rest of Hide and See's book two (I really need to think of a title!)  It's all written out long-hand at the moment though, but shouldn't take too long to type up so long as I don't change my mind too much as I'm going through it.  I think I'm quite happy with it.  In my first rough planning of the book there were certain scenes which didn't fall where I wanted them to.  Now with it better structured, the dramatic events are spread evenly throughout the narrative, rather than all being lumped towards the end.

I'm going to try to write the rest of book two in a more linear way.  While I did restrict myself to the first ten chapters to start with, the parts I wrote were out of sequence for a while, leaving me to eventually patch it all together.  When I eventually read it all through again I'm sure I'll be wanting to pull my hair out.  So I'm resolving to do it much more sensibly for the rest of it.  Right.  Let's see how that one goes.