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

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.

The hol­i­day break was fan­tas­tic, but it’s time to hit the books. I had a meet­ing with my dis­ser­ta­tion advi­sor yes­ter­day and it was AWESOME. She chewed up my chap­ter and spit it out and I’m psy­ched. It’s been a cou­ple weeks since I really looked at my chap­ter so before I review her edits, I’m going to review with my own edits. That way, I can have a con­ver­sa­tion with her edits rather than just fol­low­ing her instructions.

I’m a bit writ­ing rusty from the break so I’m just going to end this here. Let’s hope that is not a har­bin­ger of 2012.

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.

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.