Setting out

Torquato Tasso and the Muses. Illustration by Giambatista Piazzetta for Gierusalemme Liberata, Venice 1745. Sp Coll Hunterian Cd.2.1, Special Collections, University of Glasgow Library

I am starting in medias res, but this is not unusual for someone who is so chaotic in their work habits as I am, as well as an early reader of Homer's Odyssey. The thing is, I would have loved to be organised and done a proper log / blog, starting on day one of my PhD (and ideally finishing on the day after good news from the Viva came in), but it's not happening this way. I'm not even in the middle yet (as in medias res would imply), having just finished year one and soon embarking on year two of  my PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Glasgow. Although I knew about blogs, of course, and everybody is banging on about how great, important, necessary, compulsory it is to have a blog nowadays, I always feared it and thought it out of my league.  

Then two things happened, related to one another: first, I became a Hunterian Associate at the University of Glasgow, and the major part of my project for the Hunterian is a blog. (The picture above is courtesy of that project). After some investment of time and effort, it was obvious that I could do it, and it was as simple as people said it was. Second, I found a book at the gift shop on the ground floor of the Hunterian Museum, which I thought would help me with the project. Show Your Work by Austin Kleon, trite as that may sound, changed, well, not my life exactly, but my outlook on dealing with creative work, i.e. with its management and presentation. Bear in mind that I was exactly (still am deep down inside) the kind of "pre-digital" person Kleon describes (p.35), who believed that the writer's contact with an audience could only be through a finished project. To my defence, back when I first started working on a computer,  they were those huge boxes with black screens where bright orange or green characters flickered in an unsettling manner, and you had to fully type in all the commands yourself. (Funnily enough, this experience came in handy when I took an XML course last year. Anyway.)

The best thing about Kleon's book is that it not only offered sensible advice in small and easy to remember bites, but it made me take action immediately. I got the book the day before yesterday. Today I'm starting this blog. 

What is the purpose of this blog then? I'm thinking of it as an archive, where I put down - in digested form, obviously - the work I'm doing for my PhD. My academic life was quite unorthodox: earned my first degree in the 1980s - did my MSc in the 2000s, and got back for the last stand only a year ago. Having worked in various capacities in between those gigs, most notably as teacher and interpreter/ translator, I could never really settle in any specific pattern of working routine. Add to that that I am a mild case of ADHD, and the result is - well, chaos. I know some people thrive in chaos. My problem is, my work being all over the place, I often have this terrible feeling that I have done nothing to show for all these years, that because I can't see it, it doesn't exist. 
Therefore, putting a little something out every day (or most days), as Kleon advises, will help me to keep track of all this work that I'm doing without having to dig in cupboards and boxes for my notebooks of years and years just to make sure all this time was not wasted, and will set a pattern for logging, assessing, and sharing. For future reference, and for present relief.