Day in the Life 5: Some Context

I'm staring blankly at the screen, so I figured I might as well start on this next post, in which I plan to talk about the thesis and my writing process.

While I don't want to go too much into specifics - either you the reader won't care, or if you do, I'd rather you read a more polished version - I hope it is enough to say that I'm looking at a particular type of science fiction story, and following it through from the late nineteenth century to the present day, in order to ask questions about genre formation and re-negotiation, as well as about these types of stories. As a way of making this manageable, and because it presents other interesting questions, I'm focusing on print texts and texts by women writers.

At the moment I'm slowly making my way to the finishing line: two chapters are drafted, redrafted and will only need minor work (touch wood) in the final overall editing, another two have been drafted, then ripped apart and redrafted and will need a bit more finalising, one chapter is drafted and with the supervisors, and the last one is - staring back at me from the screen - begin drafted. The structure of my thesis is a little strange - the result, I suppose, of chronic indecisiveness and multiple intellectual and theoretical commitments. It is chronologically organised in the sense that it moves from the beginning of the period I'm studying the the end, but it is also built around thematic foci of genre, memory, space, time and evolution. In practical terms, this has meant three sets of paired chapters, where the first of each pair provides the nuts and bolts account of what is going on in the long nineteenth century, the first half of the twentieth and the second half. This is where my materialist/history of the book side comes out. The second chapter of the pair is the 'thematic' one, where the texts introduced in the previous chapter are explored from a different perspective. Trying to get the balance between the pair right has been the main cause of re-structuring and re-drafting in my thesis process.

Now that I'm on the last chapter, I have a fairly good idea of what it needs to say and do - which, strangely enough, doesn't make it all that more pleasant to write. In the earlier stages, I felt more open to wild ideas, strange connections and just seeing where things would take me. Now, for all that I do feel more competent ('Of course I can write a chapter, I've already done it five times'), I feel a little more hemmed in.