Bonjour, I missed last week didn't I. I got up to a bunch of things this week. Managed to slip the first draft of a chapter on fiction, imagination and smart machines in just in time which is great. I write a lot about writing on here (and will probably do so again today) but I find myself cramming at the deadline, doing pretty well and wondering what would happen if I actually paced myself.
Which reminds me of the fact that I'm currently restructuring the enormous block of text that currently constitutes the insane ramblings and have finished thoughts of a PhD thesis. I made myself a target of 8 hours a week and so far I'm sticking to it. It is no way structurally or argumentatively sound and is basically 60,000 words of polemics. My transactional, strategic mindset is really struggling to comprehend or develop a structure or even how intellectual arguments work. Consequently, I'm returning to the advice which I give students; that reading makes us better writers and am trying to read a lot more. I've become much more disciplined at staying away from the YouTubes.
I gave a talk yesterday at Arup, who I used to work for, which was just a general scope of things I'm interested in and I find this quite a useful process in figuring out what a PhD might be about, but even then, it's still all incomprehensible rambling to me. I find myself looking for answers and some surety in the whole thing but the catch with 'reflexivity' is that every conversation of an intellectual nature we have just makes things more confusing. Is all this writing about writing just prevaricating?
I have to get back to more transactional things; books to balance, meetings to set up, documents to complete. I have an hour of time right now so I want to make the most of it.
I'll send better words next week, promise.