Fall 2023 - A Theatre Kid Defends Her PhD Thesis
Hello, friends!
How's your autumn been? Are you managing okay with the shortening days and the onset of winter? I've been making a concerted effort to take a good walk at lunchtime, which I think is the main thing keeping me afloat with the sun setting at 4pm.
It's been an eventful few months over here! Two weeks ago, I defended my PhD thesis! The past four years of research & writing led up to this, and - in the end - it was a genuinely enjoyable conversation with my examiners, who asked all kinds of thoughtful questions about the novel's worldbuilding, characters, and the careful balancing act of how to represent historical violence. I remember one of my supervisors telling me that you don't often get to have conversations like this about your work, so I was very grateful. It's called a thesis defense, but it's also a great opportunity to get feedback on ways to develop the project further in the future - and I certainly walked away with more ideas for editing than I had when I walked in! (As a writer whose favourite part of writing is editing, I promsie that this is a good thing.)
I passed with minor corrections, which is the most common outcome - a few typos to fix, and a short paragraph to add. Not being one for champagne, I bought myself a fancy little cake afterwards to celebrate.
Last week, I had a few friends around to celebrate (and if you're also doing a PhD, I cannot recommend it enough - get a friend to plan a viva party for you! You deserve it!) This morning, I handed in my corrected thesis - so once those corrections have been approved, I'll be 100% done! Most importantly, I can already start forcing my friends, family, and bank to call me Dr. Mulligan.
In any case, I'm very happy to be done. With more of my brain available to me again, I've been working hard at another pass of edits on my novel, which we'll hopefully be sending out on submission to editors in the new year. Fingers crossed!
How's your autumn been? Are you managing okay with the shortening days and the onset of winter? I've been making a concerted effort to take a good walk at lunchtime, which I think is the main thing keeping me afloat with the sun setting at 4pm.
It's been an eventful few months over here! Two weeks ago, I defended my PhD thesis! The past four years of research & writing led up to this, and - in the end - it was a genuinely enjoyable conversation with my examiners, who asked all kinds of thoughtful questions about the novel's worldbuilding, characters, and the careful balancing act of how to represent historical violence. I remember one of my supervisors telling me that you don't often get to have conversations like this about your work, so I was very grateful. It's called a thesis defense, but it's also a great opportunity to get feedback on ways to develop the project further in the future - and I certainly walked away with more ideas for editing than I had when I walked in! (As a writer whose favourite part of writing is editing, I promsie that this is a good thing.)
I passed with minor corrections, which is the most common outcome - a few typos to fix, and a short paragraph to add. Not being one for champagne, I bought myself a fancy little cake afterwards to celebrate.
Last week, I had a few friends around to celebrate (and if you're also doing a PhD, I cannot recommend it enough - get a friend to plan a viva party for you! You deserve it!) This morning, I handed in my corrected thesis - so once those corrections have been approved, I'll be 100% done! Most importantly, I can already start forcing my friends, family, and bank to call me Dr. Mulligan.In any case, I'm very happy to be done. With more of my brain available to me again, I've been working hard at another pass of edits on my novel, which we'll hopefully be sending out on submission to editors in the new year. Fingers crossed!
Reading & Watching Recommendations
Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver - I picked up a few novels from the Women's Prize for Fiction longlist this year, and Demon Copperhead blew me away. I haven't read any Barbara Kingsolver before, despite having been recommended her books for years, so I knew nothing going into this beyond "it's a re-envisioning of David Copperfield set in Appalachia." Then it was the co-recipient of this year's Pulitzer, and I felt very smug about having read it already. It deserves every accolade. Demon's a whip-smart narrator with a voice that jumps off the page - I'm not usually an audiobook reader, except by necessity, but I would love to listen to the audiobook sometime. The way that Kingsolver handles contemporary issues - poverty, the opioid epidemic, the systemic pressures & cracks of foster care services - made me wonder what it was like to read David Copperfield at the time it was written, when it was social commentary rather than historical fiction.Uprooted by Naomi Novik - Another one which has been recommended to me for years. A high fantasy novel rooted in Polish folklore, it's beautiful and atmospheric and a deeply enjoyable read. I had my reservations going in, since the blurb sounded like the kind of romance storyline I'm rarely interested in as a reader, but the characters are wonderfully prickly and grounded. All of which is to say: if you've also had this novel recommended to you for years, go read it. It's as good as they say.
My reading fell behind as viva prep picked up, and now my most recent reading has been an early draft of a friend's novel, so my third recommendation for you is a show-slash-podcast. I've been obsessed with Play It By Ear on Dropout.tv for the past week. The premise is that ridiculously talented improvisers & musicians come together to improvise a new musical each week, with curveballs and prompts thrown in by the host. While it's not for everybody, I did musical theatre and improv comedy in high school - I'm like an extremophile adapted to flourish in this precise ecological niche. They released one of their Season 1 episodes in full on YouTube, if you're a recovering theatre kid like me. And here's a clip from Season 2 about teddy bears going to college. Since catching up on Season 2, I've been listening to Off Book: The Improvised Musical podcast on my lunchtime walks - the hosts are the same main cast from Play It By Ear. Every recently-viva'd PhD should have some very silly show or podcast to help them decompress; this one's mine!
Creativity Corner
In addition to editing, I've been jotting down ideas & experimenting with a few scenes for the next book I want to write. It's still early stages, so a lot of it's figuring out the overarching plot & tone. I have no better example of this than the fact that I went "Hmm, maybe I'll lean into the humour with this one and write something Discworld-y!" then immediately wrote this about a character being recruited into a mercenary company:"Later, she would realize, that was the way they got you: with compliments and clothes you dreamed of owning, with food you wished you could eat all the time, with laughter and a promise of belonging. Enough to make you forget that the face behind the beard was no older than twenty-five, and like as not would be dead within the year."
It's a barrel of laughs! To be fair, my favourite part of Discworld (and especially the Sam Vimes novels, my main point of reference) has always been the combination of humour and biting commentary. (My external examiner said that my PhD thesis was funny and horrifying, which is pretty much what I was going for, so maybe we'll end up there with this book as well!)
In any case, I'll most likely be back with another newsletter in January. I hope you have a fantastic rest of your year, and I'll see you soon!
With love,
Siobhan
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