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

This is a oldie, but oh-so-relevant goodie. Jay Smooth — one of my favorite video blog­gers and founder of WBAI’s Under­ground Rail­road, the longest run­ning hip hop show in New York — breaks down the Lit­tle Hater.

The Lit­tle Hater is the voice of doubt in your head and there’s some­thing about his pars­ing the logic of the Lit­tle Hater that weak­ens it for me and gives me an out from the hater spiral.

Since I moved to Cal­i­for­nia, I haven’t blogged at all and my work on my dis­ser­ta­tion has fallen off a bit. Need­less to say, my Lit­tle Hater was in over­drive. Here it is in a nutshell:

• It tells me that my ideas aren’t worth anything.
• That all praise received in the past was a prod­uct of trick­ing said prais­ers into think­ing I was more tal­ented than I am. (Never mind that pulling off that kind of trick­ery would make me a witch in pos­ses­sion of mag­i­cal pow­ers that should enable me to fin­ish my dis­ser­ta­tion. #AccioDis­ser­ta­tion!)
• And lastly, My Lit­tle Hater is a revi­sion­ist mofo. It goes back to sparks of insight and tells me “that was a dumb idea, what were you think­ing?” I lit­er­ally have to write notes to myself that say, “This is still a good idea, stick with it” just to shut my Lit­tle Hater up.

So I’m tak­ing a stand with my Lit­tle Hater and say­ing, “Not today.” How about you? What’s your lit­tle hater like?

Note: If you like this video, Jay Smooth started post­ing Ill Doc­trine again with reg­u­lar­ity for AnimalNewYork.com.

See Also: The Bal­lad of the Lit­tle Hater

A cou­ple of months ago, I wrote a post about writ­ing a dis­ser­ta­tion as a stay-at-home mom. I get the ques­tion a lot: How do you do it? I’m not sure how to answer it, I mean, I just do it. The obvi­ous answer is the Mr.‘s sup­port. He brings home just enough salary for me to stay home and write with the kiddo. I’m incred­i­bly lucky in that I don’t have to teach and it’s a trav­esty that so many of us bur­geon­ing aca­d­e­mics are left shit out of luck when “acad­e­mia” doesn’t allow room for fam­i­lies. But that’s another post.

Any­way, I thought I’d open the door to a day in the life of a writ­ing mama. I keep a pretty reg­u­lar sched­ule which, for me, is the only way I accom­plish any­thing. This is just what I do and I would love to hear what all you dis­ser­tat­ing mamas do as well.

Daily sched­ule:

5:45–6:45AM: HELLO MOMMY! HELLO DADDY!

6:45AM: Get out of bed

7:01–8:15AM: Cof­fee, Rachel Mad­dow Show, hang out with the Mr., catch up on emails, read daily news, blogs, tweets

8:16–8:45AM: Get dressed for gym, pack snacks for Althea

8:46-11AM: Walk to the Y and drop Althea at child­care (SO AWESOME!), Kill myself on the tread­mill for 40 min­utes, then take Althea to open gym or the playground.

11:01–11:30AM: Head home and shower. Althea gets a snack and watches an episode or two of Maisy.

11:31–3:00PM (give or take 30 min­utes): Althea naps, I work.

3:01–4:00PM: snacks, sto­ry­time, draw­ing, etc. She’s start­ing to play a lot by her­self which buys me another half an hour of writ­ing time.

4:01–5:00PM: Do dishes from the day, tidy, spo­rad­i­cally check email

5:01–6:30PM: Pre­pare and eat din­ner or get take­out. The Mr. comes home.

6:31–7:30PM: Bath­time or play­time (depend­ing on night)

7:31–8:00PM: Bed­time for Althea. It takes this long for dia­per changes, find­ing favorite stuffed ani­mals, and read­ing a bed­time story.

8:01PM-10:00PM: Have a beer and flop down on sofa. This involves lots of sigh­ing. I usu­ally spend a few min­utes of this time orga­niz­ing my work sched­ule for the next day.

10:01–11:30PM: Go to bed and read aca­d­e­mic blogs or Red­dit.

I do this with­out fail Mon­day through Fri­day. It’s pretty fan­tas­tic because I get time with my kid and time with my hus­band. Work hap­pens slowly but reli­ably so I keep a really nice momen­tum. For me, the key is rou­tine rou­tine rou­tine. The much younger me would have hated this life, I thought in order to keep things inter­est­ing I had to be spon­ta­neous. But I have a 30 pound per­pet­ual motion machine of spon­tane­ity, I don’t think I need to insert any more chaos into the equation.

The big secret lies in that 3.5 hour win­dow of writ­ing time. You might think that’s not enough. You might think that the only way to plan to write is to set aside entire 8–10 hour work days. But I learned that I really only have 3–4 hours of solid crit­i­cal think­ing time in a day. Some folks have a bit more, oth­ers less, but in talk­ing with col­leagues and from my own expe­ri­ence, I don’t think any­one can sit and gen­er­ate new con­nec­tions and ideas for 8 solid hours. I work in 25 minute bursts, take 5 minute breaks, and I man­age to get remark­able amounts of work done when I focus my atten­tion that way.

Before hav­ing my kid, I never had this kind of focus. I would spend days doing other stuff and bank my time for long 10–12 hour work days. 10 hours is a lot of time in the­ory, and I had fan­tasies about all of the amaz­ing read­ing and writ­ing I could get done if I just blocked out an entire day. But they were just that, fan­tasies. I can only crit­i­cally think for up to 4 hours, the remain­ing 6–8 hours would inevitably fill with pro­cras­ti­na­tion and guilt. So I guess when peo­ple ask how I write my dis­ser­ta­tion with a kid, I should say, I don’t know how I ever wrote with­out her.

For those of you who are unfa­mil­iar, the exquis­ite corpse is a par­lor game invented by sur­re­al­ist André Bre­ton. He and his wacky sur­re­al­ist friends would get together and make a piece of art using col­lage. Each per­son worked on the piece one at a time until it was fin­ished. But there was a trick: each artist would cover all but a por­tion of their sec­tion before pass­ing it to the next con­trib­u­tor. Even artists get stuck, and this was a great way to stretch the cre­ative mus­cles while also cre­at­ing a process document.

This trans­lates very well to writ­ing and I often use it as my own game of writ­ing soli­taire. If I find myself stuck, I’ll copy a line or two of text from the end of a para­graph into a new Scrivener doc­u­ment and just start writ­ing from there. It doesn’t have to fit with the rest of the chap­ter, some­times it’s just a foot­note, but it keeps me mov­ing along.

The The­sis Whisperer’s most recent post fol­lows up from her crowd-sourced Google Map of writer-friendly cafés (bril­liant!) with an inven­tory of what she has in her bag. The Mr. jokes that my dis­ser­ta­tion weighs more than our tod­dler, which, if you think about it, is pretty light for an entire office. I move around a lot, and while I have a ded­i­cated office space, I’d say only 50% of my work hap­pens there. I’m a recov­er­ing “pre­cious office” addict, so I under­stand the temp­ta­tion to find your one work­space to rule them all. What’s a “pre­cious office” addic­tion? Symp­toms include: obses­sive orga­ni­za­tion, end­less search­ing for the per­fect chair/keyboard/desk/coffee mug/stapler before you can work, and going on about how you can only work in your pre­cious space, with a cup of 95 degree green tea, and a 1.0 Micron pen. You know you’ve hit rock-bottom in this addic­tion when you’ve spent a month (or 5) obsessed over your office, and not, you know, writ­ing your dissertation.

As part of my recov­ery, I’ve nar­rowed my work­space needs to the basics. Since a) I never know when I’ll have a few min­utes to chip away at my work when I’m not at my desk and b) I’m full-time mama, which means I always have a tod­dler bag full of Dup­los, baby wipes, and a vari­ety of snacks. So my other bag, my work bag, needs to be light enough to shlep around Brook­lyn. So here goes:

1) iPad. I’m going to write a post about apps in a minute, but let’s talk about how frig­gin’ awe­some it is to carry a hun­dred books with you in a device no big­ger than a mag­a­zine. Hello future, I’ve arrived! I should also include my iPhone (pic­tured in my daughter’s hand) here as well. I use the voice memo app ALL the time to doc­u­ment notes and ideas on the fly.

2) Mole­sk­ine note­book. My favorite is the Ruled Note­book, large. They’re big enough that I can write on my lap, but not so big as to be unwieldy. Every­thing goes in my mole­sk­ine. Teacher’s Notes, diss notes, gro­cery lists, research ques­tions, etc. A pro­fes­sor taught me a trick a while back for note­book man­age­ment. When you get a new note­book, set aside 10 pages or so in the front for a table of con­tents and num­ber your pages. When you’re fin­ished with the note­book, go through it and orga­nize your notes in the table of con­tents. It’s a great review and makes your note­book a use­ful tool in the future rather than sim­ply an unsorted mess.

3) Narrow-ruled legal pads. This might seem a bit redun­dant since I carry a note­book, but I draft my actual dis­ser­ta­tion on legal pads. After I’ve processed notes from my mole­sk­ine, I hand­write prose on the legal pads, to be tran­scribed later on Scrivener.

4) Metal clip­board. I still like to read arti­cles on paper — she says as she types her blog entry on her iPad — and cen­tral to my read­ing process is writ­ing tons of mar­gin­a­lia. The clip­board offers a hard sur­face to write, and keeps all my papers together (I hate sta­ples). Metal works best since both pressed card­board and plas­tic can break in a bag.

5) Library Book. There are always books to read, and to curb my Ama­zon book addic­tion, I try to check out as many from my library as I can (also, libraries are cool, just sayin’). Any­way, I bring only one because when I’m out and about, I rarely have time to read any more than that. I look back on my work bags from my first years in grad school; that’s right, bags, … plural, and I’m gob­s­macked at how much stuff I used to carry. I had so many books and arti­cles with me along with the hope that I would get to all of it. The down­side of this? I felt like I hadn’t really accom­plished any­thing at the end of the day. If I bring the barest min­i­mum of mate­ri­als, com­plet­ing a few small tasks (read­ing a few pages or writ­ing some thoughts) moti­vates me to keep going. Sec­ondly, too much vari­ety was over­whelm­ing. I dis­cov­ered that if I only bring one book or arti­cle, chances are, if I have time to read it, I will. (duh, right?)

6) BIC 4-color pen. I dis­cussed this a bit on my other blog, but the gist is this: use the Bic Multi to take notes in dif­fer­ent col­ors. I know many of you sci­ence folks already know and love the ben­e­fits of the Bic Multi, but many of us on the human­i­ties end of things are unaware of its charms. Here’s my color code:

• Black: My orig­i­nal thoughts
• Blue: Com­ments on readings
• Red: Ques­tions
• Green: Tan­gen­tial ideas — basi­cally, stuff that will lead me off track that may or may not come in handy later.

The nice thing about this sys­tem is that it allows you to scan your notes for tran­scrip­tion, quotes, and fur­ther research. It also helps elim­i­nate the desire to stop and look up some­thing on the inter-webs when the inspi­ra­tion strikes you. You can just click to green, write down the Google search, and keep going.

7) Book darts. The Mr. bought these for me a few years ago and I can’t remem­ber life with­out them. Basi­cally, they’re a book­mark that points directly to text. I use them to point to mar­gin­a­lia in my own books/articles and key text in library books. As an added bonus, they’re archival, so if I acci­den­tally leave them in a returned library book, I don’t get fined like I would if I used post-its.

TL;DR: In your portable office, you don’t need to bring nearly as much as you think.