Writing

Stephen (there is a link to his blog on the sidebar of this blog) returned from a few weeks away in New Zealand a few days ago and we had a chance to catch up today and do some more work on a paper we have been working on forever.. well for a couple of months at least. It feels like we have written about four papers as each major redraft has taken us off on a slightly different vector. Yet again we worked our way through word by word from the start deconstructing, rejigging, shuffling, honing etc etc and got through the first couple of thousand words after a couple of hours and some more hours. We ended up pretty much at the same point we always get to but this time we really know where we are going with the rest of it. Hopefully Saturday morning I will rebuild our vignettes and Stephen will sort some of the theory then we will meet to finish the beast off so it is ready to send off for some peer review on Monday. It is a painstaking process honing writing and seemed rather appropriate that we should be doing this on the same day Cohort 10 of BA LTR are finalising their first assessed work in time for their hand in deadline tonight. Writing papers to a deadline is as near as I can get to gaining an experiential insight into the student experience; its easy to see why students sometimes feel like giving up when they are so near the goal; there is a lot of stress and some of it comes from the sort of baring your soul to the world kind of feeling also a bit like hanging Art work on a gallery wall - exposure and vulnerability are two key words underpinning my own stress at such times but there is also quite a buzz kicks in about two thirds of the way to finishing...strange mix of emotions I am really looking forward to seeing the completed artifact at long last.