Dissertation: Done!

Well folks, it is finally over. This Wednesday I handed in my dissertation, and thus completed the requirements for my MSc Publishing degree.

It was a long and harrowing process...

... fueled by Chai Lattes...

...and awesomely edited by Megan (over 200 comments, she is amazing) and Connie (who was less helpful but nonetheless still appreciated).

I may keep spontaneously bursting into tears for no reason as my body adjusts to the sudden lessening of stress, but I am happy to be done. 

This also means I will be returning to a more regular posting schedule on here. Thank you for my patience while I ignored y'all for the last couple of months. It was crazy, but it is over now!

PS. If you'd like to read my dissertation, let me know and I'll send you the PDF. Be forewarned though, it came out at a cool 16415 words.

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 :)

School Party

Along with spending all my time at Luath, my evenings working on school stuff, I also spend quite a bit of my weekend at school working on the interior page layouts of Ah Dinnae Ken. 

The last Wednesday of class we had was rather intense...

...but we got it done.

While we didn't have to have final proofs in for our books, we did need to have all our work printed out, along with our individual essays and group essay. It was a bit of a mad day, but we managed to get it all done!

Afterwards we headed to the pub for a celebratory drink - though I actually had some lemon tea, as I was still sick. Because I'm that cool (its cool though, Laura had some too - we had been talking earlier about how we both just wanted to get a cuppa after school).

Five Happy Days

Lets do this quick and dirty.  

Sunday. Stopped at Waitrose on my way home to harass Becky at work. Bought ice cream. Multitasking ftw.

Monday. Did laundry. Cleaned my room. Did some work, then napped a lot. Was feeling really sick.

Tuesday. Gorgeous sunny day at Luath. Spent all night working on school stuff. Very busy, still sick.

Wednesday. Insanity. Printed off all our work, submitted our final group portfolio, our group buisness plan, our individual essays, and our packaged disks with the books. Still more work to do but I couldn't be prouder of everyone. Went to bar to celebrate. Got a pot of tea. Was mocked. Still sick.

Thursday. Busy, second-last day at Luath. Went to launch of new book at Blackwell's, enjoyed being surrounded by books. Also showing off my nails. Still sick. Almost done.

(Real posts will return soon, promise. I'm almost out of the rough of it. There is a light at the end of the tunnel).

In other news, and as most of you may have heard already, I'm heading home! Thats right, as of Tuesday I will be officially back on my native Canadian soil for 24 days!

Update about school

So I haven't really talked about how things are going with my course for a while, mostly because everything that is happening is really internal issues. BUT last week we did get the first couple of actual illustrations from our illustrator, Julie for The Day Boy and The Night Girl - you can see the front cover illustration over here. The production team is currently working on cover designs using those illustrations, which is really fun. We also hit our minimum crowdfunding goal for Ah Dinnae Ken, which is really awesome - while we are of course hoping to be able to hit our overall goal, just hitting our minimum goal means we are going to be able to basically double our print run. 

Overall, though it is both challenging and stressful, school is still going quite well - I've got a really great team for the live projects, which is helping making them fun even as they are busy!

It was really sunny the other day, so some of us ended up on the front steps during our lunch break (if you are wondering why there are so many girls - Jonny is actually the only guy in our 18-person team). 

(Top, left) Sophie, Mairi, me, Annemarie, Camille, Kate (Bottom, left) Maya and Giulia

Crowdfunding & Stop Motion

Edit: like tomorrows post, this post ended up being pushed from the week it was written for, and thus all dates mentioned are actually more like two weeks in the past. Sorry about that. 

Last monday we got together at 10 to practice our presentation on Wednesday, but we didn't have class after that until 3, so Laura, Maya, Lindsey, Becca, and myself headed down to The Treehouse for lunch - I seriously love that place. After that, I went to Starbucks and read for a couple of hours. I've been reading a lot this last couple of weeks - I took a bit of a break after finishing the first three books in Cassandra Claire's Mortal Instruments series, before reading the fourth one (which I did not really like, while I really liked the first three). Then I read Veronica Roth's Divergent, which was amazing (another occasion of me staying up to 3am to finish a book because I couldn't stop reading), read John Green and David Leviathan's Will Grayson Will Grayson, and am currently reading Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett's Good Omens. There are two more books in Roth's series, but, as amazing as they are, I decided I needed a break from YA sci-fi and fantasy, and when Will Grayson Will Grayson wasn't enough of a departure from that, I decided to go for an actual adult book.

In other news, last week I *finally* managed to finish editing the video for Ah Dinnae Ken's crowdfunding efforts. There were a couple of delays in getting it done - while Laura and Lindsey and I got together a couple of Tuesdays ago and managed to take all the photos and write the script for the video, there were a couple of delays in getting the voiceover recorded and finding music, but it finally came together last Wednesday! If you haven't seen it yet, our crowdfunding is now live, and if you'd like to go and have a look and support our efforts if you are interested, you can find it here.

These are some "stills" from the video. While we were going to simply film myself drawing and then speed it up, we couldn't figure out how (or if) you can film on my DSLR, and so decided to simply photograph myself drawing, and then edit them together in a stop motion video (it was quite the set up, with the camera in a tripod on the table, facing downwards, with me awkwardly drawing between the legs of the tripod while Laura clicked the shutter).

Some of the pictures ended up being cut to make the video more brief and succinct, and also to help it line up with the script, so while the little guy above is still in the video, the speech bubble got cut - a good aspect of doing stop motion is that it makes it very easy to do things like cut certain scenes or aspects. 

Live Project The Second

Our second live project is called Ah Dinnae Ken: Stories of Scottish Identity. An anthology of short stories, the book deals with issues of Scottish identity and is aimed at Scottish teens. As with the other one, I'm not going to be talking about them too much on here (maybe more after the trimester is over) but I will say this project is proving much more logistically difficult as it will be made up of nearly all new, never-before-published work from significant Scottish young adult authors.

What does it mean to be Scottish?

Can "Scottishness" be defined, and is there really a difference between Scotland and the rest of the UK? Some of today‘s leading Scottish authors for young adults – Theresa Breslin, Matthew Fitt, Cathy Forde, Keith Gray, J.A. Henderson & Cathy MacPhail – address these questions and more, in this thought-provoking collection of stories about national identity. Each story is unique, some are amusing, others moving but together they show how different people, ideas and even dialects make up the Scotland we know and love today. With a foreword by Scottish journalist and broadcaster Stuart Cosgrove.

As with the other project, you can follow our progress on the website, on twitter, (#AhDinnaeKen), and Facebook, where we are currently running a bit of marketing which involves people sending us their pictures of what Scottish means to them, which is turning out to be quite fun.

While The Day Boy and the Night Girl is being published to be sold in bookstores, we are hoping to give Ah Dinnae Ken out to various Scottish high schools.

Live Project The First

The first book that we are doing for our live project is a reprint of George McDonald's 1882 fairy tale, The Day Boy and the Night Girl.

A boy and a girl, each imprisoned in a castle by the evil witch Watho. Photogen, exposed only to the sun, and Nycteris, familiar only with darkness. United by the dream of adventure and desire for freedom, they have a chance meeting one night. Together they must find a way to overcome their fear of the unknown and escape Watho. 

I'm not going to actually talk about the project on here, partially because I don't really want to keep checking with Marketing and Rights about what information can be made public, but you can follow our progress on the program's website. You can also check out (and like, if you are so inclined) our facebook page and our twitter (#DayBoyNightGirl). There was also a brief blurb written about our projects in Informed Edinburgh.

Totally Judging A Book By Its Cover

So last night I curled into my bed at 9 pm to start reading... and the next time I looked at the clock it was 1:40 am and I had just finished my book. In sum: if you are a fan of YA fantasy, I really recommend Cassandra Clare's The Mortal Instruments series. 

After Rachel and I deciding that we were too brain dead after an entire day at the school to do French Club Wednesday nights, we have moved French Club to Sunday afternoons. Which was really fun and leisurely, and, y'know, we didn't stay so late we got kicked out, which was a nice change of pace. My french continues to get better and better (22 day streak on Duolingo) and French Club remains fun and chill. 

After French Club was over, we inevitably ended up wandering around the bookstore - I didn't buy anything (go me!) but it remains a very real danger, and is definitely the (somewhat questionably) downside of meeting in a bookstore (its also kind of an upside). We also engaged in quite a bit of criticism about cover design and fonts, which was very nerdy. Below are some of my favourites. 

Also seen: my pretty pink nails :)

#adulthood

This week marked the first full day of our publishing in practice live project. While I'm not sure how much I'm allowed to say about what we are producing yet... (I'll have to check with our marketing and rights departments!)... but it is already very exciting, if rather hectic (one of our project involves a lot of original content, with our final submission date for printing being May 7th, that does not leave our authors much time to get us the content, much less time for editing and prod to do their thing). So it is going to be pretty much full throttle from now until then but I am very excited for everything, and I think we have a really good team going forward!

Today I had my first class in my Interactive Media module. Given how hectic the live project is going to be, and that I am Project Manager on that particular course, I am more than ever glad that I decided to go with this module instead of the Magazine module (they also are doing a live project - two magazines). So those who chose Magazine that are in the general MSc Pub course are now doing two separate live projects... I predict quite a few melt downs from that group before the end of the semester. Personally, the live book project and the placement are more than enough excitement. Beyond any time concerns, though, I am genuinely excited for the interactive media module. We will be covering things such as social media, gaming, blogs, movies, books, interactive platforms... it should be very interesting, and will tie in quite well with some things I covered in my undergrad (my text and technology class, my religion and technology class). Another bonus: there are two projects for the course. First, to make a 'blog' on tumblr (for those of you not familiar with it, tumblr is sometimes called a microblogging platform... to be honest, I've never considered any of the tumblrs I have had to be real blogs. So it will be fairly low-maintenance - they only require 2-3 posts a week, no more than 500 words per week). Our lecturer did spend quite a while today talking about how tumblr and different blogging platforms work, and given that this is the second blogger blog I've had, in addition to two wordpress projects, and about six tumblrs, I was kind of zoning out at various points :P He was quite nice though and I think it is going to be really good. 

It was fun, when he asked who there would consider themselves gamers, it was all girls who raised their hands (breaking stereotypes, hell yeah!). This module is also outside of the publishing program, so while about half the class is publishing students, the other half is (somewhat randomly) scriptwriter students. I was expecting people who were doing some sort of technology-focused major, but it will be fun to get to know some new people! 

After that course, I attended the PPA Scotland's Digital Meeting which was held at Napier. There were speakers from White Light Media, DC Thomson, and Flipping Pages Media talking about digital media, online engagement, and how to build websites, if it is worth it to develop apps for magazines, etc. My program leader requested we either tweet about or blog about the event on the MSc Pub blog, so while those of us in attendance are planning on doing a group blog post, I was also actively tweeting throughout the meeting (Georgia commented afterwards that she was impressed by the speed of my tweeting... someone would say something, she would pull out her phone, then see I'd already tweeted it - clearly I can now put 'social media guru' on my business cards). 

(Maya and me - Maya is from the States)

So that was fun. We hung out after that for a bit, for the networking and wine, but most of the "adults" had left, so I didn't stay long, instead heading out to The Merlin for dinner with Jack, Becky, Eve, Candice, and Melissa (I really like it when we go there because it is about four min from my flat :P). They also do a two meals for £9.99 thing which is pretty awesome. 

Check out my awesome sauce stack #adulthood. 

I don't have any class tomorrow, so I don't really have a lot to do until Sunday, which is Alix's birthday party, unless something comes up with the live project, but hopefully none of the departments run into any issues with their first week :)