Book in the Post

A book I ordered on the post arrived today.  Here it is:                               

What the pictures can't convey is the musty smell of the old book (which I  bought for less than three pounds, most of it for p/p) and my joy in actually holding it in my hands. You see, this book was described as "inaccessible" in another academic book. That one, on foreign visitors in Constantinople between the tenth and thirteenth century, became available to me through an interlibrary loan. I got access to both books within three or four days after requesting them, and without having to travel far and wide in order to get  them (well, I had to go to the University Library for the ILL[1] one, but that's not far. At any rate you are supposed to see the inside of a library while you're doing a PhD, even nowadays).   
There really is no "inaccessible" today, is there? 

[1] ILL: InterLibrary Loan. A wonderful thing, for which universities pay quite a bit of money, sparing you the trouble (and expense) of going on a quest to find a book necessary to your research yourself. But it seems there are people who order books and then don't bother to go pick them up. Recently the university has decided to impose a penalty - a fiver - in such cases. 

A Novel is Born

It is funny where ideas come from, and how they sort of gestate and develop and form over time. And then you have a substantial piece of work, a book, and you look at it and say to yourself: even if nobody else knows it, even if it's never going to be published, or even if it is and few people read it, I've done this. Regardless of what happens in future, I've done it. This is a feeling that no negativity can take away from me.

The novel in embryonic form: file cards.

The important thing is to capture the ideas as they come. I tend to use filing cards in the first stage of gestation (I'm sure this is a very silly metaphor, but in my mind it is associated with warm eggs protruding from the straw - a very vivid picture from my childhood, though I lived in a rural setting for only four years).  

 First I write down some questions and ideas and then look up for books that might help my research. The cards are perfect for this: easy to carry about in your purse, minimum fuss when you go into the library. In the PhD there is a lot of theoretical research as well as the factual stuff you need for a historical novel. The file cards are not only light and versatile (for hasty note-taking), but they are traces of all my various searches, reference and archive in themselves. 

Research is obviously indispensable, but there is a trap - actually more than one, but I'll deal with research particularly for historical fiction in future posts. In a creative writing project the most important thing is to keep writing the story, the novel, the poems, the play, or whatever it is one is writing. But it's very easy to spend hours and hours reading up and taking notes on research and neglecting the writing part. I suppose the same goes for any other PhD, too. Research as a form of procrastination, or perhaps an expression of fear: a wish to put off the moment one has to deal with the work itself. 

My novella The Life and Times of Milagros Riquelme was first written in these notebooks.
The early ones have very little in common with the actual
text as it was submitted for my MSc dissertation. 

My remedy for this is - what else could it be? - to write. Even if it's silliness, or incoherent phrases establishing a mood, or setting a scene, or a half-formed conversation, I fill in those notebooks, or I type and type like there's no other thing in the world. For a few hours, everyday. Even for a few minutes, if it can't be hours. (Eventually it will have to be, but that's another tune, which I'm sure I'll be singing in a years' time).

Is it a good thing to be a split personality and do and keep your writing in two different media and various devices? I'm sure more organised people than myself would decide what method is best for them - longhand? typing? - and stick to it. I am writing this post on my laptop, and some of my notes and first drafts are here, on on the ipad. But the very first formulation of an idea, a story, a character, is and always will be in longhand, on file cards and notebooks. I've come to see those as planting pots, or small patches of earth, where the first seeds are deposited. When I'm fidgety and restless in front of a blank computer screen, I shuffle the cards, or rummage through the notebooks. 

Implements for purple prose.

Pens, pencils, and fountain pens are also important for analogue me (see previous post). I love my Cross pen, and purple ink: it reminds me of my grandfather whom I never met, a teacher; he died in 1956, in his late forties. He used to write letters in purple ink, with that elegant hand which people took the time to practice back then. There is something about words written in purple ink: they seem to be more alive, to be flowing from one end of the page to the other. Blue is dull, black is funereal; there is a whiff of legal papers and of the notary in a page scrawled in black. But purple is good: kind to the eyes, vivid, and a little bit old-fashioned. Just like what I want my writing to be. 

Analogue and Digital

I envy my son. Not (only) because he's young and intelligent and beautiful, but because he was born well within the digital age. His first pictures my family saw were sent over the Internet; he reads and plays both in the real and the virtual world; computers and technology have no secrets for him. 

PhD Project: a notebook for each role.

I am a different story. Computers had been invented when I was born (I'm not that ancient), but I don't think private citizens owned them then - not in Greece in the late sixties, at any rate: there must have been something like six or seven room-sized ones in the possession of banks and research centres, perhaps. At school we were taught to read in books made of paper, to write with pens and pencils, to do our research in libraries where you had to use a step-ladder, and be covered in dust - and sometimes cobwebs. 

Sribophilia? Is there such a condition?

When I began to use a computer in the late eighties, as a sort of posh typewriter for writing and printing mostly, it was new and exhilarating (look! you type in and then you can overwrite and it changes on its own!), although it took me a while to get used to typing in the appropriate commands for everything. (I've mentioned the unexpected benefits of this many years later, in my very first post.) Then came the nineties and the developments were so fast - the white screen! the icons! THE INTERNET! THE LAPTOP! - that I can't keep track of them. By then, a schizoid pattern in my work had already been established. Journals, stories, the occasional (bad) poem, translations, letters, essays, dissertations, notes, in big floppy discs, in small floppy discs, then no discs but sticks. In notebooks and notepads of all shapes and sizes. Yellow rubber-tip pencils and fountain pens and rollerballs. PC, laptop, ipad. Being both a stationery fetishist and a gadget maniac, it is obvious that I am being literal when I'm saying that my work is all over the place. 

Best thing about being a student again?
New note pads!

Analogue or digital? The younger generations are blissfully unaware of the dilemma. But for me it's real. You do more with a machine, it's true. Writing is faster and the ideas flow, and not having to strain your eyes to decipher it later is an added bonus. But nothing smells as nice as a stationery cupboard full of old, worn, worked notebooks, and brand new ones waiting to be used, bright and pristine, as beautiful in their way as bridal accessories (and without the complications involved). An ipad doesn't smell of anything - neither does a laptop. You can't press a sprig of basil inside it and discover it many years later and try to remember where and when and how. Yet you can shape and reshape painlessly, and share quickly. And print. 

The Apple Orchard

Oh well. I'll be both analogue and digital all my life, I think. If it's a question of head vs heart, it's not even a choice: you need both, you can't do without one or the other. But writing - the physical act of writing - has a little to do with, you know, those greats you've been looking up to all your life: the Prousts and the Yourcenars, the Austens and the Woolfs (Woolves?): their quills and fountain pens, their sheets of paper whisked away when visitors came and their typewriters clicking away in an empty Bloomsbury house. What would they have done? What would they have chosen, given the choice? 
Who knows?
 But does it matter really? 

So, what is it that you do?

School of Critical Studies, 5 University Gardens, UoG

I am a PhD student. I've said that already. But what is it that I actually do? The image associated with a PhD, for many people including myself before I had any experience of it, is either of a genius in a laboratory replete with white coats and test tubes, or a half-mad, bespectacled recluse snowed under a pile of books in a library. I suppose all of us PhD students, depending on whether we work at the hard sciences or the humanities, might appear like one or the other at some point during our hours and hours of research. But a PhD nowadays is much more than that. Reading (loads) and writing (and discarding much of it eventually) still form a chunky part of a doctoral researcher's day, but now there are more roles, more call for engagement and impact and getting your work 'out there' - which sound depressingly like marketing speech - and this is only a small indication of the corporate, managerial style (alas!) taking over universities now. There are positive sides to it: being urged to get out, see more, do more, learn new stuff not necessarily related to your research is a good idea, particularly for those who have spend much of their lives in the cocoon of academic life. By that, I mean the young. For us older hands who have been out in the world already, it's what we've been doing already.


So what do I do? First, I work on my PhD, at the University of Glasgow, School of Critical Studies (a mellow-coloured though not photogenic building, pic. above)

The University of Glasgow was founded in
1451, when there was still a Byzantine empire:
the perfect place to write a novel set there! 

A PhD in Creative Writing has two components: the creative, in which you write an original work, and the critical, in which you engage with theory/ do scholarly research.
For the creative component, I am writing a historical novel (working title: Zoe, or The Obscure Rose), set in the Byzantine empire, which revisits the First Crusade from the viewpoint of marginal characters. For the critical component, I am examining issues related to the links between historiography and historical fiction, with popular narratives of the time of my novel (Lives of Saints, romances, dream books), and with national stereotyping in First Crusade fictions. I am also looking at two novels set at the same time and place, Count Robert of Paris by Sir Walter Scott, and Come Forth King, [ Ένας Σκούφος Από Πορφύρα, literally, A Cap of Purple] by Greek author Maro Douka, translated by David Connolly. Some of the character in both those novels are historical: Anna Comnena, the princess historian, her father, Emperor Alexius I Comnenus, and her mother, Empress Irene Doukaina. Anna Comnena will be a character in my novel, too, but only in a minor role: I want this novel to be about poor, unimportant, marginal people. Queens, princesses, kings and lords have dominated historical fiction for a very long time, as they have dominated historiography. They've had their say. Let others speak now.


I am also a Hunterian Associate. Details on exactly this programme is and what I'm doing there can be found here and here. This is an extraordinary opportunity to take my research in places I wouldn't have normally thought of, outside the sometimes sterile setting of desk and library. I'm talking about physical places: the Hunterian Art Gallery, the Special Collections of the UoG Library; and virtual places: my blog (or two). Fascinating stuff.


I am also a College of Arts Intern. This is still a mystery and a miracle to me, how I was made one: it is one of those extraordinary things that happen to you and make you very happy when you are told and then they make you even happier when you work on them. I get to do all sorts of different things a person working in a university would normally be expected to do - basically it's a bit like trying out different positions and completing various tasks related to uni life. All sort of tasks, and that's what I love about it. For someone with a really low boredom threshold, like myself, trying your hand at different things (and hopefully helping people along the way), and finding out what you'd rather be doing and what you'd rather not, and not having to commit to anything for too long, is just ideal.

So, this is what I do for my PhD. I'm doing much, and I'm enjoying every bit of it so far (though I retain my right to whinge a little from time to time).

I'd really love to know what other people's experience of their PhD is or was. So, if you're reading this, please, do share!

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.