Happy Birthday!

Today is Christine's birthday...

I'm sure she's having a fabulous day (she usually does) and I'm sad to be missing it this year, but I hope it is filled with as much fun, family, and friendship as it usually is (and hot cowboys).

xoxo

Kyra Jensine

Dissertation Days Five & Six

After an utterly unproductive, but nonetheless lovely weekend (more on that another day), I went back to school Monday with what I hoped would be a renewed vigour. Unfortunately, it was more of a renewed lethargy, and Monday ended up being, while still productive, not my best day ever, at around 2k written. 

However, Charles and Camille stopped by to look at the music facilities or something (I wasn't that invested in the entire affair) so we took a break to do some royals watching.

Charles waved at us as he walked past, and asked us if we were having a tea break. We laughed and said yes to be polite. The entire thing was very weird. I don't get royalty. But hey. I got in my obligatory "I live in Britain hey look royal people" moment.

The day ended when I hit 10k and decided that was good enough, a fact that was really just cemented when I mentioned this to Becky and she kinda slid off her chair and then curled up under the table.

In unrelated news, I haven't been straightening my hair the last couple of days, instead giving the natural curls a chance to exert themselves for once.

I'm not quite sure about this yet.

Today was a far more productive day, and though I still have the majority of my conclusion, and parts of my methodology left to write, I finished the survey analysis and printed off a first rough draft. Today was gorgeous, and I'm hoping tomorrow will be the same - as I'm (however temporarily) back on paper, its the perfect chance to return to my old starbucks & sunshine in the morning routine!

Jordan's birthday party is tomorrow night, and I'm also going to a matinee of Rise of the Planet of the Apes with Becky, Jack, and Ali, so it is unlikely there will be a post going up tomorrow. Just fyi. 

Dissertation Day Four

Today was a bit of a lazy day - Becky and I had discussed the idea of skipping out early for a picnic in the Meadows, but the weather didn't end up cooperating. However, it still managed to be a bit of a lazy day. I did get around a thousand words written, bringing up my total to somewhere around 8k. I'll be taking the weekend off to apply for jobs and take a break from thinking about the dissertation, and then will hopefully finish up the rough draft next week. I will have a lot of editing to do, so I'm hoping to finish up the rough draft quickly to leave myself lots of time to refine the essay. Plus, once I've finished the rough draft I won't have to spend every day working on it any more, giving me more time for both my photoshop practice (which has been depressingly absent this week) and for job hunting.

I'm also still struggling in figuring out the best way to present my survey results in an Appendix. Technically, all I have to do is include them, so I could simply throw them in the way they appear on the google form and call it a day, but that is rather haphazard, and I would rather make it more organized; however, the current system I came up with would result in me having an appendix approximately 600 pages long, which isn't particularly feasible. Hopefully I will come up with something over the weekend!

In unrelated news, I got the sides of my head trimmed today.

Dissertation Day Three

Unrelated to my dissertation, the biggest spider I have ever seen just crawled across my computer screen and I am currently very twitchy and freaked out. Just FYI.

Today saw the completion of my literature review and my survey overview. I continue to worry a lot about going over my word count, but I only have three sections left, so we will see how they go. Less to say about my writing today, as it mostly involved me going through all of the literature I had gathered, pulling quotes, and writing, as well as adding to my reference sheet. I wrote more today than I did yesterday, about 3.5k, which was quite nice. I'm hoping to be done my rough draft by the end of next week, if not earlier, which I think it quite reasonable, especially if I keep going at my current rate (I've already written over a third of my dissertation, at least as far as the word count goes). I still need to write my methodology, which I think I will be doing next, my survey results analysis, and my conclusion.

Below the cut today you will find a subsection of my literature review - the history of queer YA. I've also included my section on terminology, which covers why I've chosen to use the term 'queer' throughout my essay, because if I'm gonna keep showing y'all excerpts of my rough draft, we're gonna need to cover that. I feel the need to once again emphasize that this is also the very first draft.

Dissertation Day Two

I went into writing today with a goal of 1-2k. I ended up writing 2.5k, which I was very happy with. I've kind of been hopping from heading to heading as I get bored with one, but overall I did most of my introduction, including finishing up the background, writing up the research aims, and writing out the research focus (the terminology was the main section I wrote yesterday). I've also written a little bit in methodology, mostly just noting down problems and limitations, as I do need to read a book or two on methodology to fully flesh out that section (Laura is currently looking at a couple, so I'm just waiting for her to tell me which one is the best :P). I also wrote some of the subheadings in the literature review, including 'psychosocial status of queer adolescents' and 'impact of representation on adolescents'.

Near the end of the day, I began working on my survey results overview, which I quickly realized would be the easiest section of the dissertation, as it will largely consist of posting my findings without analysis - after completing a couple of subheadings, I decided to leave it until later, and do some of the more difficult sections first.

The last thing that I did before leaving for the day, and what I think will take me a very long time, is beginning to transcribe the survey results into individual response forms. Avril and I debated for a while whether or not it would be worth my time to do so, but I ultimately decided that since I am not particularly worried about running out of time (since I wrote 17% of my dissertation my first day out) I would do it. I also think it will be very interesting for those reviewing the dissertation in the future, as they will be able to read the entirety of what, say, Respondent 140 said, if they found the part of that respondent's answer that I quoted particularly interesting or controversial.

Throughout the day I was also working on my references - I've decided to just put things in my references as I go along, making a separate pile of works that I've referenced, and then, when I've finished my dissertation, simply copy it and add whatever works I have not cited to form my bibliography. Napier as a whole uses Harvard, and while I have gotten more used to it as the year has gone on, I am still much slower at it than I was with MLA, which is making creating my reference sheet a bit more of a difficult task than I normally find it.

Below the jump, I've pasted the very first paragraph of my entire dissertation (first draft of course) if you are interested!

Dissertation Day One

I have successfully moved into my new place, and after a bit of a blip with the internet yesterday, now have internet access at home! My plan for the blog for the next little while is to continue catching up on things that happened while I was without internet (Maya's wedding, Vicki's visit, Canada Day...) but also posting little daily updates on how my dissertation is going. These won't exactly be thrill a minute type posts, but they should give those of you who are interested a bit of a glimpse into the process of writing a dissertation!

Today was my first proper day of dissertation work, at least as far as writing goes (research is proper work too of course, but with much less of a substantial evidence of work being completed).

However, I will briefly sum up what I've been doing the last couple of weeks in terms of research. I started doing my primary research before my secondary research, as I was worried it would take me a really long time to get a decent number of responses. Normally, you'd do your primary research after you completed your secondary research, as the existing literature would help guide you towards certain questions. I could have done this, since it turned out I really didn't need to worry so much about getting an appropriate number of responses. I had only had about 32 when I messaged a popular tumblr user I follow, asking her if she would reblog my post about my survey. She did, and within 2 hours I had gotten to a total of 103 responses. Two days later, I was up to 203. I finally closed it after two weeks with 285 responses. I was really impressed not only with the number of people who completed the survey (it was a pretty long survey) but also with the depth of thought put into the long answer questions. I got some amazing quotes and, best of all, the statistics that emerged said exactly what I was hoping they'd say - namely, that there is a significant market demand for well written LGBTQA+ characters that is not currently being met.

Besides dissertation, I've also been meeting with a small team of awesome individuals (shout out to Laura, Lindsey, and Becca) every Monday for the last three weeks to push through the last few tasks related to Ah Dinnae Ken and The Day Boy and the Night Girl...

... with the help of some serious Starbucks of course. The first week we went through all the internals, correcting errors in formatting as well as editorial errors. The second week we completed the covers for both books. This week we applied final changes to both internals and externals of both books. Ah Dinnae Ken is now being sent off for proofreading, and both books will hopefully be going to the printer by the end of the month.

Last week was absolutely gorgeous, so while I did need to spend at least part of my day at school (if only so I could get some internet time in and check my emails) I balanced it out by spending my mornings tanning and researching at Starbucks.

The method with which I approached my secondary research was very similar to the way I approached the research for the thesis I didn't end up writing for my last year of undergrad. There isn't a lot of literature on YA literature, much less LGBTQA+ YA, so the majority of articles I was reading were adjacent to my topic, and I will have to do a bit more work to bring it all together and make sense of if in my actual dissertation, but, as I said before, I did manage to get 50 articles read (7 of which I will definitely not be citing as they were absolutely useless but still...). So what I do when conducting secondary research is find the articles I think look useful based on their abstract, and then print them off. I know it would be more environmentally friendly to read them on screen, but I find the process of physically underlining and writing notes on paper endlessly helpfully not only to my concentration but also to my retention of information. I have a little black moleskin that I designated as 'for my dissertation' and began reviewing the articles: using a different colour of pen for each article (in a rotating, repeating cycle of pen colours) I write the article name and author in the notebook. I then read the article, highlighting and writing notes to myself where necessary (these range in helpfulness from 'lol' to actual thoughts on how to apply the article to my dissertation). Once I've finished reading the article, I rate it on the front page, from 'very useful', 'quite/fairly useful', 'somewhat useful', 'not very useful' to 'not useful'. I then write a brief summary of the article on the cover. In my notebook, under the title of the article, I then make note of what section in my dissertation it pertains to, what argument it backs up, how I can tie it to other articles, anything like that.

So reading a single article is actually quite a process for me, but one that ultimately is going to make actually writing my dissertation a much easier process.

I finally finished my research, both primary and secondary, last Friday. I took the weekend off to move, had our final day of work on the book projects yesterday, and started writing today.

Much paper. Very dead trees. Wow.

Maya had told me of her smart decision to write her dissertation entirely on google drive, which makes it accessible from any computer and not dependent on word versus pages, so I decided to copy her. Drive also auto-saves like, every five seconds, which is also excellent, though I am a compulsive ctrl-s clicker anyways.

I started by making the document, after which I floundered around for a bit unsure of where to start, before writing my outline, which ended up being quite detailed (like, listing what articles I'm going to talk about in what subsection detailed), and also six pages long. After a discussion with my supervisor, and a look at a couple of previous student's dissertations, I shuffled some things around and began writing. While I was hoping to get a bit more writing done today, I realize that I was being a bit unrealistic for my first day, and ended up writing about 500 words in my last hour or so in school. So going in tomorrow with my outline in place, I should be better able to hit my goal of at least 1000-2000 words a day. I'm quite worried I will go over my word count, as I've gathered a lot more information than I necessarily needed, but I will try to be as concise as possible, and if necessary I can always omit certain sections, so long as I cover in my methodology what I cut and why.

Overall, a fairly successful first day of writing :)

Erryday Photoshoppin'

As you may have noticed, this blog has been rather quiet this week - this is due both to the fact that I still don't have internet at home and thus need to be at schhol in order to blog, and the fact that I have been spending seven hours a day at school all week finishing up my secondary research and teaching myself photoshop. While I finished my secondary research today (50 articles read! whooo!) I will probably continue working on teaching myself photoshop for the rest of the summer.

After talking to some people who work in production (the area I am hoping to go into) I have now had it definitively confirmed that I need to have Photoshop. Since we didn't learn it in class, I am thus teaching it to myself.

So, here are what I've done the last couple of days. Also, a reminder that you can see all design stuff I'm working on on the design tab.

I am moving to my new place Sunday, and will then have internet at home!

Interlude (Sarah leaves)

Sarah got the train to London in the morning, so I went down to the train station with her and saw her onto her train. We grabbed starbucks first, and I encountered a spelling of my name I had never seen before: 

I spent most of the rest of that day at school doing work.

In unrelated news, I had previously mentioned mum buying me a Stila liquid eyeliner pen for my birthday from Sephora and I feel the strong need to gush about it for a bit.

I've had a couple of liquid eyeliners and have been attempting to master it for a couple years, but am bad enough at it that I kind of tend to avoid doing it and thus have not been getting better at it, but my friend Shanni recommended this eyeliner, as have a couple of other people I know, so I decided to give it a shot and WOW.

This pen makes it so easy to put on liquid eyeliner, even and with straight lines. Its even easy to do wings with it. And it does not move - my old liquid eyeliner I always had to be careful how I blinked right after I put it on or I could risk transferring it to my upper lid - not the case with this pen! So if you're in the market for new liquid eyeliner, I really recommend the Stila one.

Awesome birthday present <3

Tea & Carlton Hill

For Sarah's last full day in Edinburgh, we spent the morning at school while I did some work, before heading to Eteaket for a traditional afternoon tea (Sarah had requested we go here before she got here, with a message along the lines of 'can we go to that tea thing you did that post on'?). 

As usual, it was an absolute delight with way too much food. We both got Bre and Cranberry sandwiches. And I continue to spell sandwitches like they are magical beach sorcerers.

Castle & Not-Arthurs-Seat

Sarah's second day in Edinburgh dawned bright and sunny so we packed a picnic and headed out to Craigmillar Castle. 

Even the bus stop was lovely!

I've also realized that you can put posts under a cut link on blogger (lets pretend I have only just began blogging, instead of having this for absolutely ages without noticing). Since I tend to do photo heavy posts that make it very difficult to scroll back through my blog history, I will be implementing them starting immediately, either for the whole post, or only for a selection of bonus photos. In this case, for the whole post.

Sarah!

Shortly after I arrived back in Edinburgh, my friend Sarah arrived from Canada. She had booked a three week tour of Europe, and stopped in Edinburgh for three days before heading down to London where the tour departed from. 

She arrived in the morning, so after dropping her bags off at my place, we grabbed some mochas to give us a caffeine boost before heading out into the city.

We walked through the meadows to the museum, where we went through the Scottish history portion of the museum...

(I always find it funny how much their historical looms look like Connie's loom)

We then headed over to the Elephant house to do the traditional Harry Potter fan in Edinburgh stop, before heading over to Grayfriars Kirkyard to compete the HP tour.

We also stopped at the Writer's Museum, which I had never been to before and was quite interesting, before heading down to Princes Street.

Dinner with Jacelyn

My mum's friend/former boss Jacelyn was in Edinburgh as she was taking a tour around Scotland with her cousin. We met up for dinner Monday night (she had landed as the colour run was going on, and said she could see it from the plane, which was cool to know - we were right by the airport, and while I knew we could see the planes really well, I wasn't sure how well the people in the planes could see us).

Jacelyn, her cousins Neville, and the couple they were staying with, Gino and Fiona and myself all went to this lovely French restaurant.

The days are super long in Scotland during the summer as we are further north than I am used to. During the days leading up to the summer solstice, it was getting light around 3:30 and only going fully dark around 11:30. Very, very short nights. Which has mostly been disorienting - I was walking home the other night and looked at my phone and was shocked to find it was 10pm. I would have guessed maybe 8pm, 9 at the latest. The point of all this being that I was very surprised when we left dinner to realize how late it was - it was a lovely evening of conversation with lovely people. Jacelyn is awesome and I always enjoy seeing her. Good fun!