Blahs

Writing group entry for this week kinda sums it all up

goals: a) spend 15 minutes with paper A on three occasions and b) 2 x 15 minute free-writings (because they are satisfying).
 
achieved: - Overcome by Inertia and Grading. NADA.

analysis: Many excuses, no real reasons. I'm still not 100% well, though improving slightly which is a relief, and I have grading with a longish deadline which I SHOULD do which means that I spend a lot of time looking at it, and not letting myself start anything else because then I won't grade, and not starting the grading. I am chipping away at it slowly, and the deadline will come and it will all be done, but... yeah. Owning My Failure here!

goals for next week: a) spend 15 minutes with paper A on three occasions and b) 2 x 15 minute free-writings (because they are satisfying). Finish all the grading!!!

this week's topic: One of the difficulties is that teaching/service/meetings are mostly about other people's needs, and research is in many ways about one's own needs, whether it's the need to do the work for itself, or the need to have the papers on the c.v., or the need of getting out of grad school at last. Many of us - especially the women - are full of both appropriate impulses to be part of a community and inappropriate socialisations about the relative importance of others needs and our own. So research, even if it feels like a positive and necessary thing, has an undercurrent of 'shouldn't spend too much time on selfish, self-benefiting things.'

The College Misery mantra - don't care more about a student's education than the student does - is very useful. Except when the inertia mice get into the wheels...

____________________________

Furball is a bit manic - we have a lot of SNOW here in the UK and apparently that's turnewd her little head... first there was the Washing Basket Incident.  Clean laundry is an excellent cat bed, but the owner of the laundry does not approve, and tends to do totally unreasonable things such as shut the whole basket into the wardrobe so it's not accessible.  Sneaky means are needed.  She was particularly interested in the washing this week because, it being cold, I was drying stuff on the heated airer so it was all lovely and cosy.  She woke up from a nap on a shelf to see me with a basket of folded laundry next to the airer and took a flying jump into the basket.  Sadly, the laundry was still wet.  And she somehow got her leg through a pair of underpants, so as she leapt out of the nasty wet landing place, they went too... and somehow she got her head through the other leg-hole as she leapt.  Some very rude words were said in cat, and I need to do some mending, but she was fine (after a little snack to soothe her offended dignity).

Then there was the New Sleeping Place incident - I have floor-length curtains in a couple of rooms, and radiators under the windows.  In one of the curtains, the deep hem is coming undone a little.  Apparently, wiggling and rolling yourself into the undone hem and snuggling against the radiator inside the curtain is really, really comfy and cosy.  Until your human comes along and assumes that the bulge in the curtain is a sock or something that fell off the radiator and pokes it with their foot.  Being woken up like that is not funny.  Especially if you then get your claws caught in the curtain and can't get out.

Dinner-time for cats is now Dark Time (which is about 4pm, as opposed to normal cat's tea time of 6pm) or Human Just Came Through The Door time.  If I give in to the crying, paper chewing, pen stealing and general Total Nuisance Being of a cat pointing out that dinner time is NOW not later, and feed her, I get peace at the time... but then she wants Second Dinner about ten pm, loudly and insistently.  I hate giving chewed work back to students.

Writing Group January-April 2013: Week 2

Hello everyone, I hope you've all had a productive first week of writing?  I thought this week we could talk about measuring progress, since one thing that struck me from last week was the variety of methods used.

The main ones seem to be:

• time spent working - sometimes this is specified as hours of writing, sometimes as time spent on other essential research tasks like reading, organising (have you seen Dame Eleanor's post this week discussing the non-writing parts of writing in the humanities?) and thinking.  This has the appeal of being easily quantifiable, something you can clearly define in your diary or planner, and there are all sorts of toys and timers available, whether you use a pomodoro, the stopwatch in your phone or a novelty egg timer  

• number of words produced - for which there are all sorts of trackers available on line.  This one is perhaps more appealing if you are trying to complete a first draft or working on a longer piece like a thesis.  I used to find this a frustrating method, since not all words are equally easy to produce, and an edit which may improve a piece can also actually reduce the day's word count.  I think I was also put off this method by the example of a fellow grad student, who was due to submit her PhD the same month I did.  They chose to do all their labwork before starting to write, and on the designated date sat down with all new stationary and opened a new file on the computer.  They began at the logical place for a scientist, with the methods chapter, and rattled off 2000 words, with references.  Then they did some maths - 80,000 words needed, 2,000 words a day, that's 40 days or about two months allowing for weekends and figures - and promptly took a week off.  Needless to say, some of the other sections were not QUITE so easy to write, and they submitted quite a bit later than planned...  But then I did NaNoWriMo, and I do now appreciate the use of a word-count goal!  (especially if you have a graph to plot your progress on against some recommended rate...)
• Making a list of smaller tasks, and ticking things off - lists typically include things like 'make a figure' or 'read and take notes from this book' or 'check the bibliography'.  Particularly useful when you're not at the word-generating stage of a particular paper, I find, and has the advantage of requiring you to accomplish something concrete which can be pointed at - "I did that this week" - even if your word count hasn't gone up.  Or maybe I'm the only one capable of spending 6-8 documented hours with a paper, in which I honestly did focus on the paper and not sneaky internetting/daydreaming/having the file open while I did something else, and yet not feel like I made any progress?

What do you prefer?  Do you use different methods at different stages of a project?  Did I miss any?

If you usually stick to one method and are feeling a bit frustrated with your progress, how about trying a different approach to defining your goals this week?

A reminder of the reporting-in format: please use this to structure your comments so we can all see how things are going!

     Paragraph 1: last week's goals.  (see list below)

     Paragraph 2: what you achieved. 
     Paragraph 3: analysis/comment of what worked and what didn't. 
     Paragraph 4: next week's goals. 
     Paragraph 5: comments on the weekly topic or whatever you want to discuss. 


 Here's the roll-call from last week - please let us know if we missed anything or got anyone's details wrong!

Amanda@ladyscientist: finish the meat and potatoes part of my first fellowship app and read the paper that I'm refereeing

Amstr: 1) read what I've written of Ch. 4 so far, 2) make and prioritize a reading list for the chapter (incl. what I've already read and what's left), 3) annotate/notes for research read, 4) draft 3000 words

Another Postdoc/living academically: no specific goal set for this week

Bardiac: no specific goal set for this week

Contingent Cassandra: Come up with at least the beginnings of a plan for the semester. Also, get some responses to conference CFPs for spring/summer/fall 2013 out.

Dame Eleanor Hull: at least one hour a day on the MMP, in a mix of reading, writing, and transcribing early modern wills

Danne: 1) Write a page or more every morning. 2) Read one chapter or article a day. 3) Avoid obsessing over teaching

Elizabeth Anne Mitchell: touch the article every day, coming up with a plan for each week until completion

Emmawriting:  no specific goal set for this week

Good Enough Woman: Work for six hours, reviewing the primary text and writing up the theory application section for Chapter 5

heu mihi: work on the article for 5 hours: organize those scraps and pieces of the original article, start re-reading a relevant primary text

humming42: complete a first draft of the survey

JaneB: 1) identify the key developmental stages of papers 2) go through my list of potential papers and group them under those stages 3) pick one and make a detailed inventory of the next steps 4) finish writing a 20-page administrative report that was due before Christmas (but I got sick) and send it off for internal approval. 5) do at least 2 x 15 minute free writing sessions about research writing

Jason: 6x250words; 750 words-toward-draft; read / note-take major source for analytic methodology

Jodi: 300 words and finish my syllabus revisions and survive five days of 8+ hours of classes.

kiwi2: analysis for conference talk

kiwimedievalist/zcat_abroad: to write for an hour a day on the article, and an hour on the novel - but the article hour comes first.

luolin88: 1) figure out which project I'm most likely to be able to complete, 2) write 30 minutes each on two days.

Matilda: finish writing the article now I'm working on. It needs some 1000 words and fuller notes.

Meansomething: 1) Four sessions of 12 minutes each on poems; 2) Develop submission calendar for Jan-March

Metheist: At least five hours of good work T/R--I have several ILL books due the 11th so I need to get through those. Reread chapter four and use these books to start to fill in the gaps

Nwgirl: 1) Finish revisions of two chapters 2) finish prepping for classes that start the following week. 3) 2 hours of writing/revision on the book manuscript (a total of 10 hours).

Pilgrim/Heretic: 500 words

Profacero: 25 minutes every day on research, and at least 2 hours on those syllabi

rented life: 1) organize semester schedule so that I can be sure to create time every week to write, even those last 8 weeks. 2) Do as much advance prep as possible. 3) Apply to freelance copy edit job.

Sophylou: 1) finish and take notes on Important Book; 2) at least an hour of free writing on article/second chapter (hereafter known as ASC)

Susan: work 2-3 hours a day, 5 days a week, on work that is part of my scholarly identity

Tracynicolrose: submit those two completed papers and rewrite the findings section on the BE paper.

Zabeel: 1) write seminar on new postdoc topic; 2) re-read chapter 5 and come up with a plan for revisions

weekends are supposed to be fun

I ended up spending most of the weekend pottering away at preparing data for reanalysis for the second paper (which is now being urgently demanded... sigh...) for DataCrunchingProject (see recent rant on the subject).  Not very exciting. 

I spent most of the time doing things two or three times to correect small errors (or large errors)... which is actually a GOOD reason to do this sort of thing AT HOME, where I am less distracted and can more easily walk away when it gets maddening and think things through. 

But doesn't make the process any less annoying, boring and fiddly.

Especially when I am essentially revisiting materials prepared by someone else, for a different purpose, 4+ years ago, so waste a lot of time trying to reconstruct what is going on.  I've dropped one sample from the dataset and flagged several others as potentially problematic because I just can't work out the datasheets.  If I can get publishable results from the remaining data, I don't really see the point of trying to sort it out (if it's even possible, which it may well not be this far removed).  IF.

Also, some bread got in the house and got consumed. :-(

So not the best weekend ever!

Next week:

• grading arriving in dribs and drabs
• complete two refereeings of articles and one summary-of-literature
• planning for summer teaching week
• at the end of the week I have two days of visitors/data crunching for odds and ends paper
• catching up meeting with PDF and hopefully re-submitting her first thesis paper that came back as minor R&R
• two lots of back-poking (chiropractor - no doubt good for me but at the same time costly and painful!)
• must chase up blood test results

 So I'm not likely to make much progress with DataCrunchingPaper2.  Oh well, there's always the weekend...

My Writing Space - now with added cat pictures

The Spring 2012 writing group (hosted by Dame Eleanor, over here) prompt this week was about writing space.  I began to comment over there but like Topsy it growed and growed so I came back over here.,

One thing that bugs me about my writing spaces is that they are NOT dedicated to only writing.  At home, I have an Ikea curved desk-table in the window corner of the second bedroom, which also houses my spare bed, my wardrobe (which has been half-way through a 'these don't fit/these might fit one day/never wearing these again' reorganisation for the best part of a year now), the old dining room table which holds craft supplies, mending, an old sewing machine, a quilt which the cat has taken to sleeping in, and the underneath space is mostly filled with storage crates of things like outdoor clothing and files, plus two bookcases of miscellaneous and one of study-that-isn't-pure-work stuff.  The desk itself has an old computer which is too good to throw away, a few of those smart boxes that are meant to make you organised but actually become homes for random stuff (which is at least out of sight most of the time), a printer, writing slope, assorted detritus, a pile of knitting magazines open at projects I will work on one day, the lap top I currently use for writing at home (perched on a stack of those boxes in an attempt to make me sit up better) and a cat-mat (because before I had a cat-mat on the desk, the cat used to either push stuff off to make space for herself or lie on whichever piece of paper I needed next...

Furball, lounging on her cat-mat.  Her fur-suit is unfortunately palest on her wobbly undercarriage, as you can see...

 Gazing out of the window whilst sitting on the cat-mat.  Her behind tends to hang off the windowsill... it IS narrow.  Her fur-suit looks all torbie (tortie-tabby, or talico in US-speak I believe) from behind - the ginger and white is underneath.

The cat-mat is positioned under the window, and the desk is pulled slightly away from the wall so that the heat from the radiator flows up the gap and is deflected by the windowsill onto the cat-mat - this seems to have finally stopped the problem where she presses herself against the heating vents on the computer...).  Under the desk is an old suitcase (cat bed for more serious sleeping)

Grumpily on the suitcase-bed

and a stack of pillows and stuff that go on the bed (occasional cat bed) and various socks and slippers kicked off under there and not yet retrieved and things the cat knocked off the desk that rolled to hard-to-reach corners.  On the spare bed is a slew of stuff, mostly work papers, with some magazines, novels, letters, various toiletries waiting to go into the storage closet, CDs, clean clothes waiting to go away (or rather, ones I actually wear which never get to the cupboards) and a disgruntled plushy dinosaur (my teddy-bear equivalent, made by my Mum when I was about 4.  Mostly disgruntled due to wear and tear and occasional use as a, yes you guessed it, cat bed).

Triceratops-bear on a bed of general stuff.  Must. Clean. All. The. Things!!!

Hmm, my cat clearly likes to have options, doesn't she?  Yes, there is only one of her... currently snoring in the craft table duvet nest.

At work, my office desk is of course full of non-useful-writing work, administrivia and random bits of student work and teaching materials and memos and a toy mammoth and several novelty kitchen timers and a plush Bagpuss and a few interesting rocks and a cardboard plant which is supposedly unkillable but looks rather battered and a pile of reference books and key texts which I pull out to show to students so often that it seems daft putting them back on the shelf and coffee cups and the only reason there isn't any bench-work clutter is that I also have a basic microscope desk set-up in my office and so bench-work clutter compatible with office life (e.g. slides, notebooks, record sheets, special pens, random boxes of partly used dry supplies) goes there, along with bits of field equipment and maps and at this time of year the whole is lightly top-dressed with a mulch of teaching-related paperwork.

Any time I HAVE had a writing only space, it is a real tussle to keep it that way... I'm just not single-minded and my space reflects this, I guess.  ALL my space.

Next summer, I hope not to have much if any fieldwork.  And one of my plans around the house is to get a couple of nice screens and to partition the space in the second bedroom (door and window are in opposite walls but both at the eastern end of the room, so I could divide it into an inner space and an outer space), then reorganise the STUFF so that craft stuff, wardrobe stuff and guest-room (or more normally room where I sleep whilst guests sleep in my more organised, double-bedded first bedroom) is all in the hidden space and the outer space with window and door is actually an office... but it will take committment (and a not-bad back!), or else THAT will end up half done too, and half done is even less comfortable to live with than undone...

At last!

PowerhouseProjectPaper has finally been submitted! One more thing off my desk... and onto someone else's (referees)

Deadlines can be good

PDF finished her first paper (with a lot of commenting from me and her other co-authors: we were up to version 11 when she finally hit submit) for the conference-special-issue, and sent it in in time to take a few days off for the social event she wanted to attend. Amazing what a deadline can do.

Now, let's see if we can get a paper out from the project she's actually employed on... and maybe a data-rich paper from her thesis? (like many special issue papers, this one took a fairly small amount of selected data which allowed comment on a particular topic when set into a wider analysis of published data. I think it's a useful contribution to the special issue conversation or I'd've advised her not to write it, but it's really the sort of baby paper that should ideally FOLLOW a couple of chunky this-is-my-new-data type of papers).

On the other hand, PowerHouseProject Paper is still only 'nearly' finished. Back with co-authors for one more edit of the abstract and corrections on a figure... maybe NEXT month we'll submit it?

balancing the long and the short term (and overthinking things)

I hope I'm not violating some rule of blogging etiquette by carrying on a conversation in successive posts rather than replying to comments. I don't tend to return and reread comments on other people's blogs, so I've tended to start a new post (which would allow more readers who read like I do to follow and join in a discussion). If that's irritating, please say! Of course, the other reason for this tendency is the omphaloskeptic nature of blogging - clearly woffling about my thoughts and reasoning is the main point of this place!

Anyway, today's possible violation is because NonUS FSP commented on my last post that

I totally agree with the need to focus on anything that leads to publications.
But looking at what you did do in March, I see that you made progress on the project with Exotic Country and ProjectF, which will probably translate to publications.

And yes, of course, she's right - the ExoticCountry project has already produced a couple of publications (one directly and one because I was asked to edit the English of a paper they were drafting, suggested that they should use a different statistical approach, they liked the idea and it strengthened the argument the were trying to make so they asked me to be a co-author), one is in progress, and three are on a list somewhere as things we intend to do, even if nothing new develops - and I expect it will, DrVisit will be at the BigConference this summer and we have pencilled in several sessions of talking about science together then, since I couldn't travel there this time). ProjectF, well, things are going slowly here, but if we get it right we will have material for multiple hot papers - and there's already one which I pretty much just need to write (for various reasons most of which I think are quite bad I ended up doing all of the intellectual heavy lifting, whilst PostDocF did the administrating only on the material this paper described and given her current writing rate (and the fact that I don't WANT her writing right now, because we have a major field season to get underway) if I don't write the drafts and coordinate the rewrites nothing will happen. And if I did the work and the drafting, I get to be first author, end of).

However, PowerhouseProject has been at the 'just write up' stage for well over a year (I presented the main results at a workshop either late 2009 or early 2010, not sure I remember which, and agreed the strategy with the rest of the team in January 2010. This paper is politically very sexy - a link with a huge international research project (part of a near-ten year project, 10 full time post-docs and ten grad studentships - a BIG DEAL in my field), a favour to a very influential group (as in, I'm helping them out of a hole because the person originally invited to cover beaches in the project has basically done SFA and that's going to look really bad on their final report), a door to at least three more papers with these people, and it's also nice in a collegial/network reinforcing way since the other two authors on this first paper are my first not-direct-boss mentor from my PhD days and one of the two PhD students who I inherited when I got to NorthernUni. DataCrunchingProject - the funding ended in 2008 and all that has been published is a little extended conference abstract thingie (2008), because of the decision to try and write 'the definite paper to end all papers' on our topic in VeryExcitingJournal (not in the GlamourMagz league but, fieldwise, it would be very impressive to achieve this), and the various delays which largely revolve around the PostDoc having a new job and me having a day job and getting ill at various points and generally getting fed up about it all. They guy who is PI on this project is a great long-standing colleague, we have complementary skills and have successfully secured very competitive funding twice now. Once this paper is submitted, we'll move on to another grant application, so there's another incentive to get them done.

Plus there's a backlog of other unwritten papers, all with their own powerful reasons for being written, which I am trying not to think about right now. And grant applications...

The RAE/REF is an added complication. This every-few-years research assessment process requires the submission of a small number of published papers for each academic in a department (typically 4), lots of data on the whole department (things like grant dollars earned, graduate students graduated within a set schedule etc.) and narratives (sections of text about how the department has a coherant and distinctive research structure, how supportive it is of research excellence, case studies of how our work has Impact - a popular and poorly defined buzzword), and which then produces a profile for the whole department which in some poorly defined way determines status relative to other departments in the UK and some of our funding for the next 5-6 years (the review period). The vagueness of the whole process, and the fact that different subject panels have the discretion to interpret things in different ways, seems to make the university more inclined to intervene and demanding. We are getting a lot of messages about the importance of making this summer count. Given the relative slowness of publishing in my field and allied fields (Beach Studies is a hugely interdisciplinary entity - in our relatively small department I have colleagues with graduate training in history, other humanities disciplines and social science (the 'other half'), mathematics, biological, earth and physical sciences and various applied sciences ('my half')), it is probably true that if the census date (the date by which items for submission need to be actually out and published) is 'late 2013' then papers submitted after the end of this calendar year cannot be guaranteed to make it. So the pressure is on to prioritise 'top papers' which might increase the strength of the four or however few are submitted.

I am 'susceptible' to the repetition of the message that we must all act, that it is vital, that we are not doing enough. To make matters worse, not one but two of my projects are potentially up as 'impact case studies' for the department, and I am also pressured to show steady progress with those. The pressure comes along with many positives, comments about how I'm doing really well at this stuff, but it also comes with a nasty lot of cultural baggage - like teaching, 'impact' and 'outreach' are distractions from the real work of the dedicated researcher, plus they are 'feminised' (all about caring and sharing and communication and being useful at a small scale rather than significant at a large scale). Yeah. I may have mentioned there is a 'laddishness' in my part of the department at the moment? And I, fat, middle aged, female, collegial and nurturing by instinct, inclination and choice? I do not fit. I don't even do the right kind of research or have the right kind of background (regional universities with good research reputations are clearly the best place to have your degrees from because they don't 'spoil you' with small group tuition and lots of classes and homework like AncientInternationallyRenownedUniversities. Inverse snobbery, but they are so spiteful. And it does kind of set off all sorts of complicated things in my head - I do feel guilty about my privilege, about the luck that attended my path, as well as grateful for the substantial sacrifices my parents made - and I feel like I am squandering it by being less than fully engaged, less productive, less successful, and at the same time angry and frustrated and hurt at a lack of appreciation and the narrowing of options and chances (in this field) that comes with each year I work here at NorthernUni. It's a complicated mess that I can now begin to articulate but still haven't got very good at stopping the emotional stabs from coming, even though I can reason about them).

Because I am susceptible to the pressures, and yet I resist the cultural baggage and indeed the morality of even playing along with the system, I get totally STRESSED about all this stuff, and therefore tend to let it slide - a counter-productive reaction.

The purpose of the monthly list is to pause and look up, look forward. To be a prompt to counteract the day to day necessities (I keep reminding myself that it is MY CHOICE to have a largely open door, to help students and to offer advice and science conversation to young researchers who are not in my group, to take my teaching seriously and aim to both do a good job and to continually learn and evolve, to be collegial and friendly and accessible. But these things come at a cost, especially for an intravert with some health issues). And I'm accompanying it with a list of what I actually did, so that although I might get 30% on the main list, I know that a lot of other stuff came up and was dealt with, and other projects progressed.

So yes, it's absolutely true, I did things in March that will lead to publications. And the list system is trying to get me to get some more submitted, more quickly! I'm trying to both live day to day in a more healthy, balanced way without obsessing about maybes and might-never-happens AND at the same time to work towards some longer-term goals (such as weight loss and clearing my paper and lab work backlog).

And as part of the former, I shall now post this and go to bed with a good book and a cup of cinnamon hot chocolate. Having done very little in the past few days except sleep, nap, read, feed self and cat and play computer games (gluey is the current passing fad of choice), I am hopeful of a more constructive day tomorrow. Maybe even some writing...

spending money

Well, I did it, I extravagently booked myself a cottage for a few nights in a county north of here, for a 'writing retreat' between conferences 1 and 2 (in place of the outreach event).


And thinking about it, it may be a Good Thing for the SeniorStudent situation too, because now I am effectively NOT available to immediately help out between now and the start of teaching (next week = might have some time, but have many other things to do as well (such as move office and prepare syllabi!). Saturday I leave for conference1 followed by a social weekend (yes, I have friends who don't live in my computer, and I am going to spend some time with some of them!), then writing retreat, then conference2 (I will be in the office for a couple of days that week), then my staycation. So tomorrow we will discuss what needs to be done by the end of September (effective end of field season) and then she will have to be in charge. If things go really wrong, I will be available by email every second or third day, but I will not be here, she will be without her go-to resource/easily manipulated into fixing stuff mummy figure/bossy monster, whatever role it is I am playing in the situation.

Maybe it's just what she needs. It will certainly give her plenty of rope to do with as she will...

Writing is Hard

So the last three days I've been doing all the usual stuff (yes, we really did have paid professional actors, actors with Equity Cards, acting out little scenarios "based on a real event" (and customised with unhumorous mentions of local places) at the training event on Doing The Paperwork), and around the edges I've been wrestling with a paper. An 'easy' paper, a sort of review/summary paper for a special issue that was due... well, first it was last August, and then it was just before Christmas, and then it was 28th Feb, and then we got a special just-for-us extra two weeks. So it is really, really due. It's existed as a multi-page outline since July, when I and my co-author spent a day together planning who'd do what and what shape it would have. And it's had bits added here and there, and figures made, and it's been part done for ages. The last couple of months we've taken it in turns to wrestle with this mass of... stuff. Recalcitrant, sullen stuff. It has been Work, all the way, this paper. At lunchtime today my colleague and I shut our respective office doors, mine in NorthernCity and hers on CampusWithAView, and glared at all the stuff we had for an hour.

Then we went back and read the call for papers again, and gulped.

Then we glared at the stuff.

Then we had a small revelation. There were two papers in the 'stuff', not one.

So we hacked out about a third of the stuff and put it in a heap for later attention, took what was left, shook it up, and reorganised the arguments for a different target audience (having read the call, we decided we'd not got that bit right either).

Then we went to our respective chocolate machines for bars of Divine (that's a brand) dark chocolate* and she went to her afternoon class and I sat through my afternoon office hours. And then I spent a couple of hours smoothing paragraph joins and moving sentences and making sure the topic sentences were still meaningful and adding in references, and at LAST we have a PROPER DRAFT that feels like a live paper, not a random heap of inanimate stuff.

And we have 48 hours to turn it into a submittable paper. Her turn tomorrow morning!

All this work, for 5000 words which probably won't get read much.

Sigh.

----------------------------------

In other news, rumour has it (I invoked one of the Privileges of Study Leave and didn't go to the faculty meeting again, so I only know what Dr Chatterbox and Golden Boy told me about this) that our 'work load model' will only count two published papers per person per calendar year in the future - extras (such as working on a paper with a graduate student) will not count. Apparently this makes us more likely to write 'sexy papers' in top journals. Although, if I work on nothing but a sexy paper and it gets rejected by a GlamourMag and I have to go around and around with it and i DON'T get any papers published in a given calendar year, I will get more other work (e.g. skills classes, which are I guess our equivalent of the dreaded comp.) allocated for the following year anyway. Apparently joint authored papers where one is not first author are so easy to write because all you have to do is read it once and check the spelling. One wonders if the geniuses who came up with that one are the types who have their post-docs do all the editing of the grad students papers because it's 'good experience' for them so that DrPITopOfTheHeap only sees the nearly finished version? Writing with students can be really hard work because, guess what, they need teaching how to do it! Or at least mine do. Maybe that's where I'm going wrong?



*organic, fair-traded, vegan, and mmmm-mmmm good. And in the vending machine! How inconsiderate is that?? :-)

Writing about writing, planning for writing

Boice’s Professors as Writers arrived today so I switched to reading that rather than Advice for New Faculty Members – not only was it new, and a thinner book, but there was also a quiz to do with fairly fiddly calculation of scores to assess the nature and severity of one's 'writing blocks'. I like doing quizzes!

My overall score falls at the boundary between moderate and serious problems, though the description of moderate – inefficient and somewhat painful writing rather than writer’s block – is most appropriate - I DO write, quite a lot, I just waste at least as much time as I spend writing.

Boice divides blocks into three modalities, overt behaviour, cognitive and emotional behaviour, and social behaviour. My highest modality score is in my overt behaviour – the comment for this result suggests that I am not in touch with internal aspects of being blocked such as negative self-talk. I’m not too convinced by that; but the difference across categories isn't huge so this may not be terribly strongly manifested.

Each modality is considered in seven components, and component scores can be averaged across modalities. Boice establishes a 'norm' from studying many writers who report problems writing, and suggests that areas where scores are substantially above the norm are of particular concern. In my case, 'work apprehension', 'writing apprehension' and 'rules' all score well below this norm - which makes sense. My 'dysphoria' and 'procrastination' scores lie just below the norm (probably within the error lmits, since assigning 0-10 scores for how often one does something to generate the results is not particularly exact), and 'impatience' and 'perfectionism' lie just above. Dysphoria I ascribe to my currently dysphoric response to life, the universe and washing up - i.e. to being depressed. It's not a problem particular to writing. Procrastination is the area I would have identified as my main problem: I allow myself to be interrupted, to interrupt myself, and to avoid work on important stuff because of busyness and distractions. No doubt about that at all! I'm just surprised the score isn't higher (though I guess it would be if writing was the main part of my job, e.g. if I was writing a thesis). Impatience seemed like an odd term, and inappropriate to me, until I read the description of the component, which describes how:

“in severe forms, impatience disrupts writing by making writers obsess about being hopelessly behind, feeling incapable of working fast enough or well enough to even bother trying” (page 152).

Yes, that’s me! I was surprised by the perfectionism result, because one area of consistent negative criticism from my earliest days as a writer (and indeed in any kind of situation) is my lack of attention to detail, of ‘neatness’, a trait which I’ve always understood as the opposite of perfectionism. I LIKE writing first drafts, starting with blank paper, but I get increasingly uncomfortable with rounds of revision, checking and re-checking references, all that sort of thing. Maybe this is a sort of inverse perfectionism; I’d rather not try to dot the ‘i’s and cross the ‘t’s only to be told that I didn’t do it properly? Of course, this does block work from being sent out into the world… But I certainly didn’t recognise myself, or my work as a scholar and writer, in the description of the component.

What else do I take from the book? There was nothing that was particularly new to me (apart from the jargon used to describe things and the pointers to research and writing on writing), but it's definitely a useful prompt to actually take some action. Also, I was reminded that I don’t like the social science jargon – something about the abundance of “-ity” words (e.g. performativity, materiality, automaticity) gets under my skin and irritates me. I know that generative writing works well, and reading this book prompts me to schedule that into my study leave plan, as well as regular but not very long writing commitments. And making graphs is always fun… I do like data! So I guess collecting data, consistently, is a goal for my study leave, along with tracking progress.

Building on my last study leave plan post, then, I'll try to better articulate my goals.

Set and monitor weekly/monthly goals in the following habit/life areas, diary in appropriate activities, and give them priority:·

• Diet
• Exercise/activity levels
• Sleep patterns
• Hobbies
• Spirit/mental health/soul
• Physical environment both in terms of routine chores and of one-off / rearrangement things

Academic activities: I want to set a moderate, laid-back schedule. I actually officially only do 30 hours a week (ahahahahaha). I will still have to do some email and other bureaucratic stuff, supervising project students and researchers, budgetary paperwork and form-filling and other general PI-ish stuff, and it will take time. So let's set a goal in terms of work time:

• ten hours of work on collecting and analysing data over each week
• ten hours of research-related writing, spread over five days, including at least 15 minutes of generative writing on my wider research interests per day
• spending not more than 4 hours on either class of activity in any one day and
• spreading work on each class over at least 3 days in any 5 day work period

And then I can just make a ranked list for each category, starting with some 'low-hanging fruit' activities to get some momentum going. Tomorrow I'll spare a bit of thought for how to rewrite my official plan...

P.S. thanks for nice comments yesterday. I hate that all throughout today my thoughts keep being interrupted by yelps of panic about the issue, that I was really anxious and on edge all day, but that's how things are at the moment. And I did manage to read all of Boice and do some thinking, as well as wash a load of dishes and fetch a repeat prescription, so it didn't totally take over the day. Hopefully Monday will not be too bad... and it helps to know I have support and friends here to come and share with even if it is horrible!

How many papers is enough?

An anonymous commentator wrote:

Hi Jane, a few of your posts mention papers you are publishing (yay!)- seems to be quite a few?. I'm interested in how many published papers you feel might be respectable as an annual accomplishment for a junior faculty/postdoc in the UK at a good institution - this is very hard to figure out in my field (ecology/evolution) where I live. I'd like to work in the UK for a while. . . Many thanks if you feel like answering.
January 2010 20:42

I have quite a few papers on the go at any one time, partly because the longer you work in any field the more unfinished bits accumulate, partly because of different collaborations, partly because that's the way I tend to work (lots of things ongoing at any one time). One of tomorrow's jobs is to fill out the StupidStandardisedResearchReview form for 2009, so I might post then on what I've actually done publishing-wise over the last few years.

But what is a respectable number of papers? That's a 'how long is a piece of string' question and no mistake! In the UK context, the RAE (and its replacement the REF) remains a key driver, especially for those seeking faculty jobs (or indeed post-doc positions which run into the census period which is probably sometime in 2012/2013 - given how often the details changed last time, only vague dates make sense at this stage). As best as we know at this point in time, the REF will require submission of four papers per academic for the period 2008-2012 (rumour has it this MAY be reduced to three), therefore your key goal is to produce four excellent papers in the best peer-reviewed outlets you can manage. Metrics, such as h-index, journal citation index and number of times a paper has been cited, are all likely to be looked at by your university if not by the panel, and it appears that the panels will also have expert reviewers read the papers so a cool paper in a non-CNS journal which is sub-field-relevant will not be judged just on its placement.

It would definitely be a Good Thing to be able to name a set of four REF-able papers which are accepted/in press/out by mid-2010 at the latest, although of course you'll continue writing and publishing and aiming to improve your set (remember, papers must be OUT, at least online, by the census date to count in the REF so papers for a December 2012 census date probably have to be submitted by mid-2011, unless your bit of ecology/evolution is faster at processing papers than beach studies! A department will typically want to have a choice of 6 or so REF-able papers from each person, to allow for some strategic selection of papers to support particular narratives about research strengths etc. (and so that co-authored papers aren't submitted twice by the same department - it's OK for both authors to submit them if they're in different departments, but seems to be considered a bit weak if they're both in the same one).

Bearing all this in mind, the minimum goal I work to over a 3-year rolling average is two papers per year in mid-rank or better peer-reviewed journals, one as lead author and one as co-author. Papers in low-rank journals and book chapters are extra to this goal, however research-appropriate and profile-building they are. I also aim to publish in at least 3 different journals over the 3-year period, but my work is quite interdisciplinary so there is no one clear 'best' outlet. I have just about managed that since my second post-doctoral year (in the UK it's rare to publish papers before you've submitted your PhD, so I only really started publishing when I started my post-doc). To biochem and biomed people this is probably horrifically low, and I know friends in some branches of chemistry/materials regard this as very feeble, whilst for some humanities areas it's ambitious. For the muddier, field intensive sciences like beach studies - ecology/geosciences in the broadest sense - this seems to be a realistic target.

What does eveyone else think?

Work goes on

Two grant rejections this week. Boo!!! One came with feedback which was, basically, untrue - I accept that it was a bit of a long shot, and am not at all surprised by the rejection, but to say that 'the project aims were not stated' when we had a subheading in bold saying 'aims' followed by a formal aim statement was annoying. The other, that really big one that I put in in the summer, I have to send off separately to get feedback beyond 'your score is ###: not good enough' (why??). Then decide whether to go for a resubmission next year.

Woke up panicking (properly, dizzy and heart racing/palpitations, the whole nine yards) last night for absolutely no obvious reason. Suspect that I was compiling a list of work in my sleep... took me hours to go back to sleep and of course today I'm being thick and wooly headed (and grumpy) and of course I had a load of student meetings, MORE THAN ONE of which began with 'so, can I, like, use the essay I wrote last year for this, like, assignment where we can choose the topic? Cos I did lots of work last year and, like, I'm really busy at the moment...'. And got grumpy with DrSabb (who gets disorganised and rambly when she's stressed, which she is, because the end of her visit is approaching, but that stresses ME out).

Golden Boy is still arguing with my contact in FavouriteIslands, the person I put him in touch with. I am NOT putting him into direct touch with the other lot we need to liase with, I really like them and their goodwill matters to me. Finally got an email from one of them today which was basically "how can we help, we'll do whatever you need so that your students have a good time and we get good data". Wonderful!

I finally discussed paper writing with SeniorStudent. UK PhD students typically don't publish most of their PhD before submitting it, and write a humungous monograph thing (I thought I was wordy! SeniorStudent's is EXCESSIVELY long, RIGHT at the word limit for a Humanities PhD at this university, way over the science limit - it's all good stuff, and cutting would have taken her another 2-3 months and made her go into the 'penalty zone', so it went in as is, but oh lord it's heavy). From this morass of words, she now needs a plan to extract some publications. Now, my PhD supervisor insisted that, unless he contributed a substantial amount of data personally, papers from PhDs should be published under the student's name alone - which clearly helps the c.v. points. I would have liked more joint papers with him, myself, but... he was never that interested in my work. Other labs I've worked in/know, the author list on a PhD student's paper is long. Sometimes, it's the whole committee, sometimes it's student-PI-post-doc-who-helped, sometimes it seems to be student-all members of lab currently in favour plus PI's mate - PI. I feel that intellectual contributions count as well as data contributions, and of course there's all the resources, time etc. provided to the student, but at the end of the day the student has done the lion's share of the work, if they're any good. The plan I've agreed with SeniorStudent sees her publishing two sole-author contributions, one presenting a block of new data and one relating her findings to the literature and current political concerns of the sub-field she currently wants a career in, and us publishing two joint papers (with her as first author unless she doesn't actually get around to writing them at all) which will include the new conceptual framework (which is a joint work, really, because it evolved in a sequence of conversations, not in her solo writing) and the data synthesis/modelling stuff. I think that's fair - but a little part of me which sounds suspiciously like my supervisor says I'm being careerist rather than disinterestedly scientific here. Mind you, coaxing SeniorStudent through the process of hacking her 109 999 word thesis into 4 papers in the 6-8000 word range is going to be a lot of work...

And now I am going home, my brain is going mushy, even though I still have lots of teaching prep to do. And some simulations. And... and.... and... aargh! Need cheesy doritos and chocolate!

...need....more....sleep....

I got home from work yesterday with a sore neck (from all the mouse clicking moving data around in StupidNewExcel) and after eating decided to lie down for half an hour to stretch out my back before doing housework (that was about 7-30pm). I woke up at 10pm... I did get everything done except the hoovering, but by then it was nearly 1am and hoovering seemed pretty antisocial (my house is terraced - so although soundproofing is good, it isn't perfect). And then my brain went round and round and round and round, and I was wide awake until 4am. Getting up to come to work hurt.

And my sciatica has flared up again, and my house will be full of parents from sometime this afternoon until sometime next week (Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday, depending on my Dad's intuition about when the roads will be quietest), so I will be short of sleep and perhaps even more importantly short of time alone to gaze at the wall and quietly calm down. Sigh.

PP - my room has a double bed, the back bedroom has a single bed plus lots of... stuff... plus my sewing table plus my home office. So I sleep in the back bedroom when people visit. Am planning a refurb which will put a double bed in the back bedroom, so I can stay put in future, but, you know, it all takes time... and ££$£

tig - in most of the journals I use, and with most of the colleagues I collaborate with, the order on papers is usually something like:
person who did most actual work, person who did some work, person who did a bit of work, person who is 'important' but did very little work

The last position is only the PI when the PI had very little input to the project (so that in large groups and well funded projects, it's often the PI, whereas at my end of the game with a small group and a very hands-on PI because I'm actually doing bench work and data analysis for just about every project I have, funded or not, to make the funding go that little bit further, it's much less clear-cut), it's more often someone who came through with some cash from their slush fund to pay for extra analyses, or passed on a block of data/samples from their earlier work, or just the person who lost out in the discussion over who did how much...

In most group projects, therefore, there's usually a policy of rotating authorship, with (when ethical people are involved) the lion's share of first authorships going to the post-doc or PhD. So one criterion when dividing up data into papers is making sure that different people take the lead on different intended manuscripts. As a general rule, the person taking the lead writes the first draft and coordinates the editing and is first author, but not universally (especially for PhD students/post-docs who have moved on and out of the sub-field so put the writing as a low priority, whilst it's a higher priority for the PI). My supervisor wisely pointed out that once there are more than two authors everyone other than the first is 'et al.' anyway, so fighting over position just isn't worth it for multi-author-jobbies.

The challenge comes when publishing (or aiming to publish) in predominantly American journals or high-ranked journals where author order is 'read' differently... or when working with one of the few remaining hang-outs who believes in alphabetical-order-after-the-first-author... Just another game, really.

'How I write'

Ecogeofemme has an interesting blog post up in which she muses about paper writing styles and encourages the 'academic blogosphere' to write about their experience with the nuts and bolts of writing. Well, I'm a very new entrant lurking around the edges of the sphere, but an excuse to get introspective is always fun, and I have done quite a bit of writing. Being 'ecogeoish' myself I don't write papers at anything LIKE the rate of people in some fields, but I try to get out a few each year and usually have half a dozen at various stages.

Let's start with ecogeofemme's questions:

How do you get from blank page to submitted manuscript or grant? Once I have a chunk of data or a nugget of idea that looks like it might be a paper on its own I throw some ideas down on paper. First draft is usually done with fountain pen on plain or squared paper (I love my stationary! Also, pragmatically, fountain pen or pencil moves far more fluidly across the paper so I can write faster than with a biro, and lines get in the way of sketching and linking up ideas and notes). Then I type something up under some rough headings (intro/site/methods/results and interpretations/discussion) and stick in what references I remember that will be relevant. This is always called paper_v0 - a zero draft. 'Paper' is a short, snappy one-word name or acronym for the little project that is this paper. Sometimes I try to make them funny, to me at least, but the key thing is that it's memorable and distinct.

Then if I'm being sensible I move on to the figures and to finalising the data analyses. I'm not the most artistic or graphics-talented person so maps and conceptual sketches are my least favourite bit. Again I've learnt to get started on this earlier in the process - and one of the great delights of being faculty is access to the help of a drawing office. Even if they can't do the work (if I don't have the funds for the 'internal market'...) they are always willing to look at my sketch and say things like "why don't you put this bit over there and move that arrow...". Running final versions of analyses and plotting graphs is more fun. It's also something that I have on my chore list as it's perfect for that brain-dead part of the day after lunch at the end of the week when I'll only break stuff if I go in the lab or mess up (or drop off) if I try to think - you know, whenever your personal biorhythm-mandated 'filing hour' is. 'Filing hour' is great for patiently lining up all the graphs or copying files and changing their formats.

Once I have roughs of all the figures I start writing a proper draft. I start by opening my paper_v0 file and renaming it paper_v1. I start writing by filling out the methods (and the longer I do this the more of the methods I can copy from earlier papers with minor edits!), then site description and results sections (any new ideas that come up as I describe the notes get stuck into the outer sections in a fancy font or noted in my daybook).

Then I start on my rough draft of the intro and organise the material into 4-5 paragraphs. The first paragraph has to 'sell' the topic and the last paragraph has to spell out the specific aims/hypotheses of the paper. The ones in between link the first 'this is a really cool topic, honest' to the last 'this paper is really interesting and relevant and a Significant Contribution'. I HATE writing intros. I'm crap at it, even after all these years (it's almost 15 years since my defense...).

Then I put together a rough draft of my interpretation (answers to my aims) and discussion (how my findings relate to/shed new light on everyone else's work on really cool topic and what might be done next). That's version 1.

Then I tinker around and add in some reading and do some reading and add some more interpretation and fiddle fiddle fiddle. Then I get fed up and put it in a drawer for a few days (weeks, months). Every time I have a tinkering session I rename the file paper_v1a etc.

Then I re-outline. This is a really useful step for me once I've got to the point where I've tinkered and added reading and fiddled around and got enough WORDS for a paper but I'm either fed up with it, disappointed in it, or doubting whether it really is a paper after all or just a collection of words. I print out the latest version, paper_v1n (usually in a small font, single spaced, but one side of the paper only) and all the rough figures and I take the whole lot home, clear the living room table and spread it out. I also have a pad of plain paper, a fountain pen and a few coloured gel pens. I start by taking each section in turn and number each paragraph (in colour of course). On my plain paper I put down the number of each paragraph and a 2-6 word summary of the paragraph contents. At this stage I usually learn that some of my paragraphs contain three ideas, or say the same thing as another paragraph. Mark up the sections on the original in a different colour, call them paragraph 2a, 2b etc., and summarise them. This should fit the whole paper onto 1-2 pages of A4. Now I put aside the text and just work with the summary. Are the headings and subheadings the ones I need? Is every topic in the right place? Do I bring up ideas in the introduction that I don't then revisit in the discussion, or vice versa? Where should I first mention each figure? Do I have all the figures/tables I need or need all the figures I have? This will let me write down a numbered list of figures and tables. I usually rewrite the outline three or four times in this session.

Then I start a new file - paper_v2 - which begins by putting in all the headings and sub-headings. I cut chunks from paper_v1n and paste them in. I put short notes in italics reminding me of extra paragraphs I need to write. I add in my list of figures and list of tables, and finalise the versions of the tables. If I'm being sensible I also finalise the figures at this stage. Then I edit this until I've got rid of all the notes in italics. Then I put together the reference list. This file may also go through iterations of paper_v2a, paper_v2b etc.

Then I take a deep breath and get at least one person to read over it - these days its often a co-author, but if not then I ask a colleague, a friend, a grad student, my former supervisor... and I put it aside until I hear from them.

Paper_v3 incorporates their suggestions and all the corrections and changes that suddenly leap out demanding to be made once I've had a few days away from the paper. It gets formatted into journal format and it gets submitted (once its figures are ready). It goes out in good order, but I know I could always do more - I send it out when I think it won't embarrass me, not when I think it's polished to perfection. The Pareto Principle... plus it's less painful to get revisions or even rejection of a paper that was good but still a little rough rather than a paper you think is perfect.

Do you outline? oh yeah, in fact I often reoutline too.

Do you go through many iterations or do you give birth to a nearly final draft after doing lots of prep in your head? Many many many iterations. The slowest stage is the last iteration or three, when it's n-e-a-r-l-y there...

Do you organize notes from all the relevant literature, or get your ideas down and fill in references later? Definitely the latter. I can delay starting indefinitely by organising my lit sources as there's always something else to read or re-read, so I have learnt that I save a lot of procrastination by starting first then filling in (which also helps me target my reading - once I have a rough outline I can make much better decisions about whether a paper will be useful or not).

Has your writing method changed as you've become more experienced? Yes, without a doubt - for a start, I've stopped trying to 'read up' before I write! And I start on the maps and other hard figures at an earlier stage.

What are your tried and true techniques and what have you found just doesn't work?
-- Re-outlining when I start to feel stuck - when I know something is wrong but don't know what.
-- Using a real pen on real paper when I don't want to get started
-- renaming often, and saving ALL the versions until the paper's in press at least.
-- roughing out the figures early (even if that's pencil and graph paper stuff)
-- trying to have several bits of writing on the go at once, at different stages, so I can always make progress SOMEWHERE.
-- putting it away for a week or so to get some distance from it.
-- making a few notes about what you need to do next at the end of a writing session, so that you can start the next one with action even if you feel uninspired...

What doesn't work for me:
-- starting at the beginning, i.e. by trying to write the intro first. That's the hardest bit for me!
-- trying to make it perfect
-- spending huge chunks of time just on that piece of writing - I usually convince myself I'm totally useless by the end, and have got caught up on all my blog reading, and generally not been productive.

When I was starting out my supervisor pointed me to Robert Day's book 'How to Write a Scientific Paper' - it's great, I point all my students to it.