" title="Notes from an Accidental Scholar"> Notes from an Accidental Scholar

When I was 8-years old, Berry Gordy’s Bruce Lee homage The Last Dragon was my favorite movie. I was so in love with this movie that I took kung fu classes, I did fly­ing kicks off my sofa, and I watched Bruce Lee movies with my dad so I could get the references.

This bit of Amer­i­can nos­tal­gia is brought to you by the last day of Aca­d­e­mic Book Writ­ing Month. I first read about AcBoW­riMo on Novem­ber 1 and decided right then and there to par­tic­i­pate. I did it because the dis­ser­ta­tion kicked my ass all over like Sho-Nuff and it was time to declare that I was the mas­ter, not my diss. Now if only I could get that sweet glow while sit­ting at my desk.

As you can see on my counter over there, I only made it to about 1/3 of my whack­adoo 30,000 word goal. But the glass half full ver­sion of this story is that in just one incred­i­bly busy month I have nearly two new chap­ters of my dissertation.

Some responses to this past month address­ing some of the AcBoW­riMo guide­lines:

1. To Word Count or Not to Word Count? In AcBoW­riMo, there was some dis­sent regard­ing the word count goal. In jest: Leave it to aca­d­e­mics to find con­tro­versy in any­thing. I decided to do the word count as a loose bench­mark for me to mea­sure my progress. But I had other bench­marks as well. After talk­ing with a friend about dis­ser­ta­tion goals and progress, she sug­gested a con­cept goal. She works until she gets three ideas or expla­na­tions down on paper. Seem vague? Well, I’m a human­i­ties major so yeah, it’s a lit­tle vague, but it’s also highly ada­p­at­able. I also set time for edit­ing, that way I don’t have pages of word diar­rhea at the end of the month.

2. Com­mu­nity Sup­port. It isn’t hyper­bole when I say I would be NOWHERE with­out the amaz­ing Twit­ter and Google Plus com­mu­nity of schol­ars, writ­ers, par­ents, nerds, activists, et al. My morn­ing rou­tine now includes read­ing the (#AcBoW­riMo) hash­tag on Twit­ter over my cof­fee. Know­ing that I’m not alone in what is often an incon­sis­tent, fit­ful writ­ing process is an incred­i­ble moti­va­tor. So to you all, I do hope you keep the posts com­ing under the new hash­tag #acwri. In addi­tion to read­ing oth­ers’ suc­cesses and slumps, I was account­able to the great wide inter­net. I don’t know about you, but promis­ing a giant word count to hun­dreds of strangers was more moti­va­tion that any­thing my com­mit­tee, hus­band, or brain could ever give me. You all made slack­ing impos­si­ble and you should all get a badge or the Medal of Free­dom or something.

3. Plan. Plan. Plan. This doesn’t mean a minute by minute script of what you should do for the next hour/day/week/month/year. But I found it use­ful to end my writ­ing day with some bul­let points of what to do that day and the next. Also, I use the Pomodoro Tech­nique and the Pomodairo app (Mac and PC) which allows me to label my pomodoros, so I always know where to put my focus for that 30 minutes.

4. Pick­ing up where you left off. I had two dif­fer­ent sets of house­guests this month, a week-long trip to Wash­ing­ton, DC, Thanks­giv­ing, protests, and the flu. These are all some legit rea­sons to aban­don #AcBoW­riMo because I fell behind and my per­fect month of work was sud­denly imper­fect. I learned that all months are imper­fect. Hell, min­utes are imper­fect. But you just deal and then pick up where you left off. I made sure to set aside time to write when my house­guests were here, I worked in DC, and I took time to be sick rather than “pow­er­ing through it” and pro­long­ing the ill­ness until the Spring. If you’re deal­ing with the heav­i­est that life can hurl at you, I highly rec­om­mend Char­lotte Frosts post about work­ing through tragedy.

5. Keep the count. Even though there’s only an hour or so left of AcBoW­riMo here on the east coast, I can say hap­pily that it was awe­some. I plan to keep my word counter over there because I do even­tu­ally need to get to 30,000 words if I’m going to fin­ish my dis­ser­ta­tion. And I love com­ing to my blog and adding to the bar, it’s another moti­va­tor when I’m in the writ­ing muck. I’m also pleased that #acbow­rimo is now #acwri because I want to keep this going, I want to check in with you and I want to read how you’re all doing so long as I can lean on you from time to time.

Thank you so much to Char­lotte Frost and every­one who par­tic­i­pated. This was my best writ­ing month ever, now on to the next one.

Dear Writ­ers, I’ve been laid up with the flu since Fri­day so work has sim­ply stopped. I’m so sore it feels like I fell down a few flights of stairs and I spent the first day in the fetal posi­tion because my guts were try­ing to escape. But I have some advice for other sick grad grinders out there, be sick. I’ve laid on this sofa for 2 days, watched Sea­sons 1 AND 2 of Down­ton Abby, drank tons of water, and had plenty of won­ton soup. What I haven’t done is work. I’ve done quite a bit of read­ing: blogs and the news (there’s plenty of that, right?) and I did revisit the last few notes I left for myself when I left off on Fri­day, but no sit­ting at my desk and no feel­ing guilty about not sit­ting at my desk. I need to rest and if you’re sick, you should too.

Some inter­net finds:

• GOP Clown Col­lege — Pho­to­shopped Politicians

• A His­tory of the Sky — Time Lapse

• OWS, Police Bru­tal­ity, and the War on Ter­ror: An Empire State of Mind — Essay

• CMY­Ba­con — Designy blog

• Life in a Day — Video Project

Today was a chal­lenge: this morn­ing, as part of a coor­di­nated national effort, New York’s base for the Occupy Move­ment was forcibly evicted from Zucotti Park. I con­sider myself a bystander at best, a wit­ness to what they do and their strate­gies for push­ing back against an over­whelm­ing goliath. But, I didn’t real­ize how much I needed them until they were kicked out of the park. When we heard the news, both my hus­band and I were dis­traught. We started lash­ing out at each other, over oat­meal of all things, sim­ply because we were so mad we needed to take it out on some­one, anyone.

Since I couldn’t do any­thing but watch Twit­ter, I went to the gym. A. needed some play­time with other kids and I needed to run my ass off for an hour. It didn’t help.

Sit­ting down to write this after­noon was a no-go. I received some kind advice from the inter­net (thanks @lizgloyn, @phd2published, and @ThomsonPat). I also reached out to a friend wherein we dis­cussed OWS in the con­text of try­ing to fin­ish our dis­ser­ta­tions and strug­gling with our his­tory of union activism. Today was an “all hands” kind of day and I’m sud­denly very thank­ful to all of the great peo­ple in my ana­log and dig­i­tal life. I’ve been in a funk for the past week or so about not get­ting the right kind of advise­ment or not being far enough along when, in the end, I’m not doing this to for my advi­sor nor is there any other mea­sure for how I should do this other than the way that I’m doing it. I write because I love what I do and I’m lucky enough to have allies who see its value as I do.

As for Occupy Wall Street, hang in there guys, I’ll see you Novem­ber 17.

Well? Do ya punk?

When I started writ­ing this post, I didn’t feel pro­duc­tive or lucky. I just felt behind, like I ALWAYS feel. I also felt a lit­tle angry, despite rais­ing the stakes of dis­ser­ta­tion com­ple­tion, I’m not really push­ing along any faster. My word surge at the begin­ning of AcBoW­riMo is begin­ning to look increas­ingly like a coin­ci­dence rather than the result of an out­spo­ken oblig­a­tion. A few folks have dis­cussed AcBoW­riMo as being as much about tim­ing as it is pro­duc­tiv­ity. You have to be ready to out­put words, it doesn’t just hap­pen because you’ll say it will hap­pen. Productivity-wise I was pretty pro­duc­tive today: I revised my chap­ters in a more pro­duc­tive man­ner, using the chore­og­ra­phy method in Help­ing Doc­toral Stu­dents Write, (p. 92), I did some read­ing, and I added another 677 new words.

I think the prob­lem with dis­ser­ta­tion writ­ing is that so much of the work is not mea­sur­able. I met with my diss advi­sor early this fall, and she told me she feels like I’m in the same place as I was a year ago. I’ve done a ton of work since then, but it’s all research frag­ments, read­ing, and pro­cess­ing. I want to think that this work is cru­cial to fin­ish­ing, but it doesn’t feel val­ued by my advi­sor or insti­tu­tions at large. So how do we mea­sure progress in the process of writ­ing the dis­ser­ta­tion when so much of it isn’t fluid writ­ing yet?