1:30 Thesis Update...

Had to run to a printer and proof something for work - which broke up the day. Also worked on my brilliant table showing all of the author’s work. Since I will have only one table , I need to make it a special one ;-)

came down to the Mexican restaurant and there must be a big community of Koreans around here somewhere because the drink refrigerator has cokes, agua frescas (?), coke and soju! I am now eating a veggie burrito, drinking a Heineken and swiping someone’s signal because the hotel wireless is no longer doling out IP addresses..

I have 4,836 words of new writing and still
3,340 words of the old
which means 6,824 to go and I sure would like to get to a total of 10k done before I leave this here place.. Still.. it is nice to see the halfway hump well behind me and the .666 hump ahead….

10 AM Update..

well.. now the research is beginning to pay off as I have written and cut and pasted from my notes on one of the novels and my count has hopped up..

I have 4,549 words of new writing and still
3,340 words of the old
which means 7,111 to go and I am more that halfway through my first cut at the thing..

And I think this means I will do the hotel thing again... spend all week reading and taking notes and next weekend assembling the brute... Heck, I haven't even really stepped to my theoretical approaches (read, "critical wankery") section yet.. that ought to be good for three or four pages of vapor...

The coffee seems to be hitting...

Friday Morning 9:30 Thesis Watch

Of course Hotel living meant drinking beer last night, so I woke up a bit soft-headed. It is also bitterly cold outside and I left my toothbrush at home. Ideal writing conditions, I think. ;-)

Went out and got coffee and a bagel and sat down to watch playoff coverage on ESPN. Fired up the Dolls on iTunes and finally did a bit of work.. as of 9:30 we are...


I have 3,718 words of new writing and still
3,340 words of the old
which means 7,942 to go and I am approaching halfway through..

When it's time to go BACK to writing yer gawdamned thesis

When you haven't done shit in 5 days and you wake up at 4:30 in the morning and have to jot notes down on your laptop.

Which it's why you're moving to a hotel for a few days, seeing your BAG at nights, and joining the typing classes during the day....

6 hours of writing tomorrow.. up to 40 pages would be nice...

3 more works to track down.. but I know where they all are...

now to sleep, tomorrow to work...

Stalling... stalling.. staaaaaaaaaaalling!

Reading the two examples they have given me for theses and getting cranky. One is ridiculously jargon-ridden piece arguing that Virginia Woolf was a great writer and not insane – certainly both are possible, but apparently you need to take sides. Worse, the second one compared Walt Whitman to Jim Morrison and somehow managed to avoid the phrase “bloated egotist.” I’m not sure how this is possible? The second one is even shorter than the first, not even making it to 13K words. So I still like my goal of 15k.

Did some research and found two more post-collection stories that may be available through inter-library loan. Have to check on that tomorrow. The Muse Project and MELVYL reveal no other folks who have done any criticism on the dude, so I am even more reassured that I may be the lone ranger

I think this week is to re-read all the pieces and take notes… so here we are..

I have 3,383 words of new writing and still
3,340 words of the old (added a few!)
which means 8,277 to go
(and I guess means that new words will surpass old ones over this weekend)

So I’m at about 345 words needed per day…

Thursday and Friday night I will be in a hotel with the Bizarre Alien Girlfriend and Friday morning she has to work.. so I will just sit there and type… It would be “An Excellent Thing” to be at about 40 pages by the weekend.

Took a lovely walk this afternoon.. intarwebs still down despite landlady’s attempts to fix her router… also did some work-work… so that’s a bonus type thing…

Thesissification

Ho hum.

Got a new short story and a very slight biographical essay. Read both and finished the two things I hadn’t read. Took about 1,000 words of notes, but that doesn’t count for anything until it’s in the rough draft.

Got publication dates into my database which is very useful in tracking Kim’s development (If I get completely mad I may pop all this into a relational database with character traits, symbols, locations, etc, and see what pops up that my bloodshot eyes are missing.). Still waiting on the book of short stories which is the most important of the two pieces I have on order. Tomorrow I’ll order the last book I need.

Then it will be finishing up notes on all the books and a bit more writing. After that (Sunday night?) have everything printed out and hop skip and jump over it to nail down my thesis. Class does begin on Monday, after all… ;-) I’ll also have to print out the example thesis they sent me to steal a bit of structure, which I am currently in dire need of.

I have 3,021 words of new writing and still
3,304 words of the old
which means 8,675 to go
(and I guess means that new words will surpass old ones over this weekend)

But all that means in instead of 340 words a day I must now produce 347 (Interesting how this number slips incrementally – a little finger-based math seems to indicate that if I just whacked out 175 words right now I’d hold to the 340 line – amusing, when you consider this blog post is already almost double that 175 I’d need).

Also, to hit the “Just Barely Accredited Master’s Program” model I will need at least 11 more non-authorial citations, which won’t be easy to find for an author no one has ever heard of or written on (I have no idea how someone would have done this research before the intarwebs).

Doublin’ down on the “That Ain’t Gonna Happen” (from now on the “TAGH”) quotient!

Thesis and Thethat

After two days of hard work at Swamp Valley College I was able to return to the thesis tonight.

Like the asshole that I am, I have decided that I need 15,000 words, so now I am even more behind. ;-)

Received an anthology which included a more complete biography of Kim as well as an interview and a fragment of an unfinished novel. The bio also had some dates of writing/publication. So after a bit of desultory writing I made a lovely excel spreadsheet with all known books and short stories. Now I know what I have, what is on order, and the one book I apparently still need to get. I swear I already purchased it. Oh well, the spreadsheet has a lovely area from comments so I can keep better track of these things and how the interlace.

I have 2,516 words of new writing and still
3,304 words of the old
which means 9,180 to go

as well as a lovely database and the vague realization I had better print all this crap out over the weekend and come up with some kind of narrowed thesis for the thing. Maybe it’s time to write the initial abstract? That’ll add 150 words to the thing without even having to think about it.

Ah well.. now I need an even 340 words a day to hit my target of rough draft by February… never gonna happened kiddies. ;-)

Oh, Yeah.. also time to burn a backup CD just out of general feelings of paranoia.

Pimpin' Ain't Easy

One of the SVC coaches was about to pass a major milestone and in my role as SVC pimp I had lined up quite a bit of press coverage. The press loves our college and anything that tarnishes its mighty image would be a VERY BAD THING. Therefore it was the cause of much trepidation when police cars surrounded the game just as the TV crews arrived. And, when, a few minutes into the game one of our star players was mysteriously called out of the game, at which point our offense spluttered completely and the other team went ahead, it was, well, as I said, mysterious.

Turns out the player (“player!” get it.. he’s a player!) had his out of town girlfriend discover his in town girlfriend (and vice-versa) and she took it into her head to clock him with a household appliance. He pushed his way out of the house and to the locker room. Where out of town girlfriend busted in while all the players were dressing. In the meantime, in town girlfriend called the police who descended on the playing field and hauled him out of the game. Both sides were interviewed, and since the player had some major marks on him and the girlfriend none, he was allowed back into the game at which point our excellent coach was able to go on and win his record-setting game. Plenty of TV coverage, which was good inasmuch as it wasn’t of one of our players being hauled off to the hoosegow.

Interestingly, if the player and gf had lived together? Automatic ride downtown since here attack on him would have been domestic abuse. Probable loss of game and a different story for the press.

Take home message? Don’t move in with the biatch!

Master's Update

I forgot I had done 10 pages of work on the original paper... which means I actually have

2,239 new words
3,304 old words

5,543 total words which puts me at about .33 of where I need to be by the end of the month. No intarwebs connection at home last night so I pounded above 2k on the new words.

Also found the text I need to give the analysis of multicultural literature which will provide my measuring rubric. I plan to put this into "definitions" and work bits of it into the body of the thing. Still feeling my way towards my abstract, but I think a week more will bring this clear. Also, ordered the last existing piece of (known) printed lit for the man.....

I might even get this done... ;-)

Thesis Watch - Prelude

So here I am.... author in hand (Kim Yong Ik) and more or less of a topic (Vision/Divison Perception/Reception and how that works for Kim as a multicultural writer). Now it is to write the thing.

And I have a plan, oh, do I have a plan.

I have approximately 1,000 words written out of a proposed 13,000. 13,000 would be 50 good pages of text not counting all the other stuff involved in the thesis. That should be a good start.

Class begins on the 8th of January and ends on the 3rd of March.

So, I'd like to have my rough draft in place by the end of January which would give me a month for revisions. This means, if I write nothing else before the first, in January I will need to write 400 words a day.

Of course this will never happen in a million years, but what must it be like to have an entire month for nothing but revision? ;-)