Fascinating Research Day

Our subject group held a research day yesterday. The presentations were diverse: two reasonably conventional academic papers were read. They were interesting in their own right. It’s good for us anyway to exercise that intellectual academic muscle. This, in the end, is what we are all about.
There were other discussions too about early career researchers, funded doctoral programmes with outside bodies and taught doctoral programmes where students with similar research interests across institutions are collected. We talked about how we might reshape our present research clusters. One colleague gave us some ideas about how we might maximise our research time. This included only writing papers for conferences in bullet points, so that one does not end up writing the papers twice. Other ideas were to link teaching and research and to do one’s creative writing at the time of day that suits you best.
So, now I’m full of plans. I’m champing at the bit to apply for one of these doctoral programmes. I’m thinking of linking to IBBY or Seven Stories. Any interest out there in getting a funded Ph D linked to one of those?
I agree absolutely about the bullet-pointed conference paper. It was good to hear my ideas confirmed.
And I’m trying it. I’m writing this now as part of my two hours’ writing before I start on uni admin. Lets see how it goes.
We did struggle more to see how we could make our onerous admin part of our research. Maybe I have an answer: today, for instance, I might finish off my application for sabbatical in my “writing” time. It is a form of writing after all.
In the end, we creative writers have to write. It is part of what we are and is the bottom line of why the university employs us anyway.

Research Day

Today is my research day. Today is the day I concentrate on my own writing. After last week’s fiasco when I lost six hours’ worth of work at the touch of a button, I am being more careful this week. I am not multi-tasking. The only thing I have open apart form Word is Twitter. Twitter is non-invasive I find. I just “tweet” when I finish something, and I then reload the page and see what other people have been up to.
I’ve even got my mobile switched off and the house-phone is on answer machine – though it will probably still annoy me.
So, in a few minutes, I’ll be returning to Babel and carrying on with the scene where Kaleem meets the medics who are rebelling against Switch-Off. Then I shall try to repair the damage from last week. Writing is hard. Do we sometimes do everything we can to avoid it?