Tag: ideas

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news

Here I Am!

February already?

The run up to Christmas and the New Year was busy in our house, and then it was straight back into work. Except that work was not the way that it is regularly. I’m trying to add to my business, or rather my outputs, by being a publisher of role-playing games and materials. Unpacking that is a post for another day, but I found myself working on that business a lot in the quiet days of January – when universities are less likely to hire a skills trainer for workshops and the like – but also feeling secretly like that was something I wasn’t supposed to be doing.

I earn a living and support my family by doing workshops (and sometimes selling books!), not from games. It felt wrong to spend my time on those things. And yet I wanted to be working on making zines, developing games, commissioning artwork and laying out text. So what was wrong?

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quick thought

Commitment and Starting

I spend a fair amount of time thinking up ideas. I have a hope and a goal to develop a kind of muse business, one that I can set up and let run, that will contribute to my family’s financial security. I want to explore new topics with postgraduate researchers, and to do what I already do with them better. And, as you can tell from this blog and my books, I want to write more books for postgraduate researchers (and possibly for other audiences too).

A big problem, one that I’ve carried over from my PhD days, is procrastination – well, not exactly. It’s a bit of procrastination, a bit of Imposter Syndrome, a bit of “what-if-this-doesn’t-work-out?” I worry. The key of it all is thinking: “What if this idea is not right?”

This is a perennial problem for me, but something that has helped a lot recently has been re-reading Poke The Box by Seth Godin, which I mentioned in a recent post. Previously, I would build up an idea, then stop, stop short of going through with it. What if it wasn’t right? I’ve had an idea for a new book – actually, for a series of books – and I thought that it was good. Great actually, if it’s OK for someone to say that about their own ideas!

And yet… What if it wasn’t right?

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quick thought

Hard To Find A Gap In A Chasm

I remember reading somewhere once, I don’t know if it’s true or not though, that if the Earth was the size of a golf ball it would be almost entirely smooth. Holding it in one’s hand we would not notice any mountains, the Grand Canyon would be indistinguishable and so would the deepest ocean trenches.

Seen from a great distance or a different scale, the massive seems inconsequential. Yet from inside the Grand Canyon, you’re dwarfed by what’s around you. On a workshop once, a postgraduate researcher shared with me that they loved their research field, but that they were struggling to find something to focus on.

“After all,” they said, “It’s hard to find a gap in a chasm.”

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quick thought

Circumstances

I write a lot of my posts a few days or a week in advance. This suits me, but along with using Buffer to schedule tweets it gives the impression that I’m here a lot, when in fact the lights are on a timer and I only check the mail when I feel like it. Last week, when I published three posts on here and one over on Viva Survivors, I started the week in South Wales and finished it feeling exhausted due to illness. It was only when I had a look just now that I realised I had actually published some thoughts last week – and got some comments! – for the most part when I got home I was too busy focussing on feeling sorry for myself.

Skipping The Gory Details

Now, I wasn’t really very, very ill. I don’t know what caused the illness, could have been something I ate, more likely to be a virus that seems to be going around. I had to cancel a workshop with less than 24 hours notice – which I hated doing, and hope I get to Edge Hill soon! I felt hot, cold, hungry, unable to eat, weird, tired and all sorts of other things. But towards the end of the week something worse happened.

I couldn’t drink tea.

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quick thought

Bad Powerpoint

A short post and a few thoughts for today. I was reviewing my business notes a few days ago and realised that I have delivered nearly 40 First Year Development Workshops at the University of Liverpool. That means I’ve met and worked with over 1000 new PhD students at the university! A key component of the workshop is communicating research ideas, and one way we do that is through a group Powerpoint presentation. We help participants think about how to do this well, and start that process by sharing the following video:

I don’t use Powerpoint a lot for my work any more; I like the spontaneity of having a few key points in a talk or workshop that I’m trying to explore with participants, and being free to work towards those points in a variety of ways. I think that I can do this better with flipcharts and boards rather than a pre-determined series of images and text.

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writing

Recent Writing, Part 3: The What

Last week I published my second book, The Viva: Who? What? How? and as part of the process of publishing I want to spend a little time this week thinking over what that has been like. In my day job, we frequently extol the virtues of “Plan -> Do -> Reflect -> Review” – the cycle for experiential learning. And I also really like that call to arms that has done the rounds a fair bit in recent years, “start with Why”. On Wednesday I explored the Why of writing a book, yesterday I looked at How and today I explore What – which in this case means reflecting and reviewing to see what I’ve got from writing a book this time around and what this means for my future writing.

The What

First of all, the outputs from this project. I wrote a book which clocks in at just under 20,000 words, has twenty-seven chapters plus introduction and afterword, and which is now available from two different places, Amazon and Payhip. In the former space it has already entered the top ten for one of the charts it is registered for, and in the latter I’ve seen great engagement from people who want an alternative to the Kindle. There are no reviews for the book (yet!) but I’m optimistic given the few email responses I’ve had so far.

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writing

Recent Writing, Part 2: The How

Last week I published my second book, The Viva: Who? What? How? and as part of the process of publishing I want to spend a little time this week thinking over what that has been like. In my day job, we frequently extol the virtues of “Plan -> Do -> Reflect -> Review” – the cycle for experiential learning. And I also really like that call to arms that has done the rounds a fair bit in recent years, “start with Why”. Yesterday I explored the Why of writing a book, so today I’m looking at How: both in terms of my personal process and also the practical things that I’ve used – software and the like. Tomorrow, I’ll explore What – which in this case means reflecting and reviewing to see what I’ve got from it this time around and what this means for my future writing.

The How

Writers must really grow to hate that perennial question “Where do you get your ideas from?” Answering, in my opinion, can make things seem a bit dull and boring – I like that mystique of divine inspiration or talent! Or perhaps that is just something I’m aspiring to… In any case, the answer in the case of the most recent book does seem a little dull: I was recycling earlier ideas I had had. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not talking about the book itself or the subject matter being dull – quite the contrary! – I mean the means by which I got to that idea.

I had been thinking about a book of useful questions for postgraduate researchers for some time, but had stalled somewhere in the writing process. And then I knew that I wanted to do something useful to follow up Fail Your Viva, but wasn’t quite sure what. I had begun a book of essays on the viva, but was stuck with that too. And then I started blogging, which freed up some of the thoughts that I had. As I said in yesterday’s post, this started to bring things together and suddenly I realised I had the idea.

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writing

Recent Writing, Part 1: The Why

Last week I published my second book, The Viva: Who? What? How? and as part of the process of publishing I want to spend a little time this week thinking over what that has been like. In my day job, we frequently extol the virtues of “Plan -> Do -> Reflect -> Review” – the cycle for experiential learning. And I also really like that call to arms that has done the rounds a fair bit in recent years, “start with Why”. So today I’m exploring the Why of writing a book. Tomorrow I’ll come to the How, and on Friday I’ll explore What, which in this case means reflecting and reviewing the process to see what I’ve got from it this time around and what I would share.

The Why

I’ve been keenly interested in the PhD viva for almost five years. My interest – and in particular my interest in helping postgraduate researchers prepare for it – just keeps on growing. Over the last five years my involvement has looked like this:

  • 2010: Does a few workshops on viva prep in one university.
  • 2011: Expands into other universities.
  • 2012: Still more universities; starts the Viva Survivors Podcast.
  • 2013: More unis, podcast, publishes first ebook (Fail Your Viva).
  • 2014: More unis (!), podcast returns to regular schedule, research into viva experience, first steps at research dissemination, starts writing second book.
  • 2015 so far: More workshops, regular podcast, more research and publishes The Viva: Who? What? How?

Every year I’ve done more on the viva, and in different ways. I think it’s important that PhD candidates know that the viva is something that can be enjoyed. I think it’s important that they know there are useful and effective ways of preparing for it. In the latest book I wanted them to get a sense that it was also something which didn’t have to be a mystery: people have lots of questions about the viva, and there are some answers out there.

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news

Interesting Things, April 27th 2015

I used to do a fortnightly round-up of things that I had been sharing or things that I had seen whilst on my travels, and then I stopped doing that. I think it would be a mistake (for now at least) to promise to do that regularly again, so instead I’ll start this irregular series of posts: Interesting Things. The condition for sharing things in these posts is that the thing I’m sharing interests me (or it’s something I’m doing, because I like talking about myself sometimes!).

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news

Funding the Podcast

Last year I had what I thought was a bright idea: I would create a Patreon campaign to support the production of the Viva Survivors Podcast. An ongoing patronage programme where people who wanted to fund the creation of a resource sharing PhD and viva experiences could – completely opt-in and no barriers or paywalls in front of the episodes. That’s the very last thing that I want.

I had high hopes and then… nothing! No patrons, no enquiries, nothing. And then after a couple of months a piece of EU legislation around VAT and digital sales came in, and I had to take down the campaign anyway (it would put me in an incredibly difficult position to have to register for VAT, and the application of the rules to platforms like Patreon are not clear yet).

Back at square one? Not at all.

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