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 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!

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).

Busy, Busier, Busiest

Well last week was just as busy as I thought it was going to be, as has this weekend been, wherein I spent most of my free time at the school working on finishing up the book projects (did all the internal pages for Ah Dinnae Ken) and doing some stuff for Hashtag - if I go home for a couple of weeks soon, as I am hoping to, I won't have access to InDesign, and so need to actually get ahead on a coupe of spreads for Hashtag so I don't end up ignoring it for a month.

Today is a bank holiday, so Luath Press was closed, but because I am missing both my wednesdays during the placement due to class, I asked if I could take home some stuff to work on at home, which I have been doing all day. I also need to write a short personal essay for wednesday.

I was hoping to get some more blogging done this weekend, other than this short update, and did manage to get the photos from Mallorca uploaded to my google album, so at least thats a start, but I've also unfortunately come down with a cold (which I've kind of been expecting the last couple of months... it'd been over a year since I'd had a bad cold, it was bound to get me sooner or later). So my throat feels like I've been swallowing glass, my nose is running, and my head feels like it has been stuffed with cotton balls, which is not particularly helpful when trying to write words and stuff.

Thus, you will have to excuse me - it looks like its still gonna be a bit longer before I get back to posting consistently. In the mean time, I am going to bang out this essay and then go curl up in my bed and feel sorry for myself.

xx

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

Panic & Design

In a moment which is a rather accurate summation of my entire approach to, like, school and life, I decided to start applying for jobs only to come to the realization that a) I'm really interested in the design and production side of book publishing, over the editorial side, and that b) I didn't really have any portfolio to speak of to show employers and say 'see, I can do things!' And thus this weekend I ended up spending an incredible 16 hours at the school doing design stuff (the school's computers have Adobe Creative Suite, including InDesign and Photoshop, and while I would love to have those tools on my computer, I'm afraid that *might* kill the poor thing). While you can see all of the things I did this weekend in the 'design portfolio' page in the sidebar (over thataway ---------------> ), I'm going to post some of my favourite pages here.

My totally bad-ass setup Saturday

I have to say, though designing things does that a lot of time (like, I spent 2.5 hours redesigning my CV, and each magazine layout takes 1-2 hours), I absolutely love doing it, and even though I spent 16 hours at school on my days off, I really enjoyed it, and am not even a little bit upset about having done so. Which bodes well for my career choice (hooray!).

Also, except for Alix on Saturday afternoon, I had the mac lab to myself, and was thus blasting my jams while I was working, which was pretty awesome. I went and saw the Lego movie the other week with Kate, which was awesome, and it is a really good movie, but I've had the main song stuck in my head ever since, so I played that a couple times (Alix sung along with me though so its cool, I wasn't annoying her too much).

In other news, I still suck at photoshop. Happily, Alix was there Saturday afternoon to help me when things began to go awry.

Another note: while the page layout and photographs of all the spreads below were generated entierly by my brain, the mock magazine and book cover designs, which were photoshop files, I actually downloaded from graphicburger, which is a really great resource for designers, and is also were I got all the nifty wood backgrounds. Also, I wouldn't bother trying to squint and read the text - besides the title and quotes, all of the text is lorem ipsum, although a very special and awesome kind called cupcake ipsum that I got from this text generator (and which Alix introduced me to). While my lecturer made the argument for getting text such as Kafka from this generator, as it more closely mimics the spacing and flow of ordinary English text than lorem ipsum, I can't help but feel that since cupcake ipsum is basically the best thing ever, and makes placing holder text far more entertaining than it ever is usually, I'm probably going to keep using it.

Oh, actually, the text on the book reviews layout is real text, but its just reviews copy-and-pasted from Alix and I's goodreads, and aren't necessarily very good (Alix's were so long that they actually cut off - so actually, hers are pretty good. Mine are mostly snarky - the one for Lunar Park by Bret Easton Ellis reads "This book had so many genuinely terrifying moments, its really a shame it was written by Bret Easton Ellis and not a less pretentious and egotistical author." ... if you can't tell, I really don't like Bret Easton Ellis.

And without further ado...

The book cover is a WIP, but I got tired earlier Saturday than Sunday and stopped.

You Don't Want to Mess With Knitters

For my interactive media class, we are required to propose a potential interactive media project -whether an app or a game or something else. I had been thinking about this since our first class the week before, and was starting to be a bit concerned come Thursday, as it seemed that everyone else had thought of what they were going to do already. However, for the last hour or so of the class (we went over my 30min but I don't think anyone really minded) we split into groups to discuss our projects. I was second, and announced I had no idea. While we went around the circle though, I began thinking about apps and the idea came to me to do a knitting app, so by the time we came full circle and my lecturer announced they were coming back to me, I was ready, and presented my idea for a knitting app.

There are a couple of features that I've thought of so far, and they include things such as:

• Comprehensive tracker for stitches and rows, so that you don't have to keep writing things down and crossing things out.
• Pattern storage.
• Tutorials.
• Dictionary (with pictures) of common terms/stitches.
• Barcode scanner that would check yarn compatibility against patterns for gauge. 
• Gauge calculator (I'm thinking something that would measure how tight of a knitter you are ie. my stitches are always way smaller than my mum's). 
• Needle sizer (just have a to-scale picture on the phone and compare sizes)

I downloaded a bunch of apps, and while some of them have some of these features, none of them have all of them (and some, such as the barcode scanner, aren't in any of the existing apps that I looked at). 

My lecturer seemed pretty impressed with that and said it was really real-world applicable and targeted a specific, interested audience, so I'm pretty excited! We don't have to do any programming work or design, we just have to argue our idea, so this should be pretty awesome! 

#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 :)

Real Life (Update)

So last Thursday marked the end of a lovely, if unproductive, two weeks of watching a lot of movies, reading a lot of books, and hanging out with friends (some highlights include the day I did not see a single other human being, the day Melissa and Alix and I had a movie night - watching The Cabin in the Woods, The Wolf of Wall Street, and Bon Cop, Bad, Cop - going to the National Museum of Scotland with Eve, Becky, Melissa, and Alix before going back to Melissa's place for pancakes, where Leanne joined us...

Becky's penguin was enjoying the catapult game

And Alix was giving me sass

... and Melissa, Alix and I getting Starbucks, going shopping, and then having a girls night, complete with wine, facemasks, and painting our nails).

Alix and I split a pair of cool earrings from H&M (my necklace is also from H&M)

Nails! (and wine!)

Face masks ;P

I also had to scrape out the freezer, which was starting to resemble more a glacier than a freezer. David walked into the kitchen when I was scraping ice out onto a towel with a spoon and he just looked at me and asked if I really missed Canada that much.

*just like home*

Thursday was just a quick meeting in which we learned which live publishing projects we would be working on this year. We were divided into two groups, one of which will be coming in all day Tuesday and one of which will be coming in all day Wednesday (my group). I volunteered to be co-Project Manager of my group, so, along with Camille, I will be in charge of managing all of the departments and signing off on any major decisions. While I am kind of nervous, I am also rather excited.

The projects which we are doing were chosen out of all the publishing projects that were proposed (mine was a reprint of The Turn of the Screw, which was not chosen) the board of Merchiston Publishing chose four to go ahead with, though not all four will necessarily end up being published, depending of course on budget and time. Both the groups and the books for each group were assigned, and then we decided on roles. First we choice the project manager, two for each group. Then people choose which department they wanted to be in (they could be in multiple departments but had to also pick their primary department that would take their priority). Camille and I also had to join depts so I joined production (which will include design and digital). The departments were: editorial, production, marketing, finance, and rights. Then people volunteered to be department heads, and we ended up having to vote on the dept heads for editorial and prod.

View of the courtyard (finally no scaffolding in way of the view)

Friday we received our grades for two of our final three assessments from last term (passed both, whoo!). We then attended a rather mind-numbing orientations for both our dissertation and placement modules. I am quite excited for both modules, though our dissertations don't actually start until next trimester, I tentatively am thinking of writing on censorship in YA literature through parents, schools, and publishers (this will need to be better thought out, obviously, and I need to pick a country to focus on).

Friday night I ended up making gingersnaps at like midnight, which was fine, because I also FaceTimed with Logan, Connie, and Brad for three hours. It was Logan's birthday Saturday (happy 21st bro!) so Connie and Brad had gone down for the weekend - Logan and Dad had been skiing that day, so I chatted with them while dinner was cooking, all the way through to dessert (and my final batch of cookies).

Yup. He's an adult.

Gingersnaps (this recipe comes to me from Connie, who got it from Brenda).

3/4 c. of butter
2 c. sugar

Cream together

2 well beaten eggs
1/2 c. molasses
2 tsp. vinegar

Stir in

3 3/4 c. all purpose flour
1 1/2 tsp. baking soda
2-3 tsp. ginger (I go for the full three but I'm a big fan of spicy gingersnaps)
1/2 tsp. cinnamon
1/4 tsp. cloves

Sift and add

Mix ingredients until blended. Form dough into 3/4" balls. Roll in sugar. Bake on a greased cookie sheet (or on parchment paper) about 12 min.

In the UK, they don't typical measure using cups, tsp, tbsp, etc. Instead, they measure everything by weight. While there is a scale that came with my kitchen, I wasn't really thrilled with the idea of converting all my cookie recipes into weight, so I went and bought myself a set of cups and tsp/tbsp measuring spoons. However, when I opened the butter, instead of markers indicating a cup, there were ticks for 50g. *sigh* So I guessed. They also call baking soda bicarbonate of soda and you can't get it at a lot of the smaller grocery stories, which, considering that those are mainly were I shop, caused me to think that you just couldn't get baking soda in the UK. I still complain about it a lot.

Saturday I was supposed to go to the Writers Museum with Kate, but it was raining, so we decided to postpone. I had a lot of people over for Burns Night that night - more on that on my next post.

Yesterday was my first official day of classes, which involved a class for Publishing in Practice (the module in which we are publishing the real live books) which was mostly talking about finances, followed by the Placement module tutorial, in which we just answered any questions we had left about our placements. So Monday I have PIP from 2-3 every fortnight, and then Placement and Dissertation modules from 3-5, on a rotating schedule (so next week on Monday, we will not have PIP, but will then have the Dissertation tutorial). Tuesday I do not have classes, then Wednesday we are in from 9-5, with a board meeting at 10, working on our publishing project. Thursday I have my optional module, Interactive Media, from 10-1. And no classes Friday. So a pretty awesome chill schedule. I have decided not to try for a part time job this semester however, both because it is better to have a more flexible schedule for the placement, and also because I am a Project Manager which will involve more time and responsibility.

So for our placement module, our placement is about ten days, though it can be more or less, and involves self-assessment, making learning goals, and an assessment by our supervisor wherever we go for placement, which we get to choose off a list on the MSc Pub page if you want to check it out. I'm not quite sure what we will be covering for the class on the placement, nor the one for the dissertation, and I haven't had my Interactive Media class yet, so I will keep you updated on all of that!

My hair is getting longer and longer! Also £1 necklace FTW

MIA & Christmas Travels

Sorry I haven't posted in a while. This week I had two of three major projects for this semester due, so it got pretty busy there for a while. But I handed the last one in today, and don't have to hand in the final project until Jan 8th! However, I am flying to London tomorrow morning, so I'm not sure how much I'll be posting for the next couple of weeks. My cousin Sam kindly invited me to come down and stay with her in Bath over the break, so I am flying to London, staying there in a hostel for a couple of days, then spending a week (including Christmas) in Bath, before heading off to Paris for New Years (my friend David is doing an internship there and invited me to come visit). So while I may not be posting over the break, I should have lots of photos and stories to share when I get back!

But first - some things I did (besides school) in the last week.

My tutorial group had our christmas party. We decided (at my suggestion) to do a yankee gift swap, but instead of random gifts, to buy our favourite book to put into the exchange. While my all-time favourite book is probably still To Kill A Mockingbird, most people have already read that, so I decided to put in House of Leaves which is, as you may have heard, the best book I've read this year. I told Kate I was getting it, so as soon as it was her turn, she grabbed it, but unfortunately Keira decided to steal it in one of only two steals of the night (the other was from me).

Every one a book!

However, we are all such nerds that I think everyone was pretty stoked... certainly not many people wanted to steal. Our main reaction seemed to be "Book! Mine not yours BACK OFF". Then we spent half an hour flipping through the books we got and barely acknowledging each other.

I got a lovely copy of The Hobbit from Laura! :D

Photo courtesy of Sergio

 From left to right: Lindsey (USA), Chentong (China), Laura (UK), Rachel (UK), Jonny(UK), Sergio (USA), Annie (UK), Keira (UK).

Photo courtesy of Sergio

 From left to right: Sarah (UK), Kyra (Canada), Kate (Canada), Steward (UK), Ali (UK), Sophie (France), Lindsey (USA)

Photo courtesy of Sergio

 Since we were basically the only people in the bar, the barman kindly agreed to take a group photo.

A large part of the rest of my week was spent both at school and hanging out in my living room by the fire (pictured) finishing up my Project Portfolio for Publishing in Practice (the book proposal, including market research, publicity plan, product rational, production schedule, design brief, cover mock-up, and sample pages) and my assessment for CreativeToolkit (redesigning a former Merchiston Publishing project - Detective McLevy's Casebook - including a cover, interior pages, and prelim pages)

Last night I went and saw The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (again) in this lovely movie theatre... not that its fancy or anything (awesome movie btw).