I had a slightly hectic December, with a week of intensive in-person workshops on creative research methodologies in Cork and two (self-imposed, what a fool) deadlines, as well as the usual pre-Christmas stress. So, as a reward for all my hard work, I gave myself a total break over the festive period. Which felt like a brilliant idea at the time, but what I had forgotten is how hard it is to rebuild momentum once you’ve screeched to a halt.

After the obigatory day or two of faffing and panicking and not really achieving anything, then, I decided what I needed to do was: a) write down everything I’ve done (read, written, attended) so far, and b) make myself a (simple and achievable, so it didn’t make me cry again) plan for the next few weeks.

What I’ve done so far

I highly recommend this strategy to calm a flustered mind – so long as you’re fairly sure you have actual done some stuff. Once I’d got it all down, it turned out I’ve done a huge amount in the less-than-six months I’ve been doing this PhD, including writing over 30,000 words. Admittedly, barely any of that will go into my actual thesis – quite a sizeable proportion of it was funding applications – but it was all relevant, and not only is it all good practice for when I do come to finalise my thesis, but I can honestly say that everything I’ve written has caused me to think more deeply about the project, from either a practical or philosophical perspective, and that has to be a good thing.

The reading was harder to quantify, mostly because I haven’t been as good as I intended to be about noting everything down and keeping nice, organised files of ‘Read’ and ‘To Be Read’. However, I decided it probably wasn’t helpful to beat myself up about that, and anyway the conclusion was that I have undeniably read a lot. I could definitely do with being more strategic about what I read and when, instead of taking my current scattergun approach, but unfortunately whenever I try that — by downloading an article and thinking “I’ll read that later” — I promptly forget all about it. So if anyone has any tips on how to stop that happening, I’d be delighted, but in the meantime I’ll just stick to reading things that look interesting and relevant as they arise.

The short-term plan

This semester I’m doing an external module at Goldsmiths, Children’s Literature in Action, as part of which I’ll be running a mini research project that will hopefully serve to pave the way for the workshops I’m planning towards the end of my PhD. Between planning and carrying out the project, attending the weekly seminars and doing the reading, that’s going to take up a fair amount of time, so I really wanted to go easy on myself the rest of the time, while still making sure I’m making some headway with the larger project.

Thankfully, the first stage of my literature review is to take an in-depth look at everything my source text author, Camila Valenzuela, has written. I did the hard bit (her PhD thesis) before Christmas, so now I’m left with her fiction, which fits the bill nicely. I’d already read quite a lot of it, but have spent January immersing myself in the mystical world of the Zahorí saga – an epic fantasy trilogy that is set partly in modern day Chile and partly in ancient Ireland. These are her earliest works, and it’s fascinating to see how her thinking (and writing) has developed over time – there are buds of ideas in these novels that really take shape in her more recent books, and finding all the threads and weaving them together feels like low-stakes detective work, which is exactly what a cold, grey, endless January requires, if you ask me.

More on the actual brainwork next time!