writing in public

My labmate and I are at writing date. Working on our laptops. There are 2 other young women also working on laptops. There is also a group behind us ranting on and on and on about people using computers all the time. Forget computer viruses- "Computers ARE the virus."
Sometimes, working in public is not so good because you have to deal with the public and the public is pretty annoying as a whole.


In better news, I voted! Yay me!

Back to writing date....

Presentation date

Writing date is still going strong- we even recruited a new writer! Sneks takes the prize with a big 900 (!!!) words in just over 3 hours! It was discussion too- not just methods or something easy!
I cheated on the writing portion today and mostly worked on a presentation. I then gave said presentation at my departments informal student seminar series this afternoon. The talk was on a side project that was started 2+ years ago. We are trying to write it up but the results aren't great. It could have about 30 more experiments and still seem incomplete. The topic is relatively new and what work has been done produces complex (sometimes conflicting) results. The audience had a lot of questions and I had very few answers. Most of the questions were of the 'Why don't you do X?' or Y? or J? variety. Well. To tell the truth, I had to stop doing experiments on this project because I didn't want it to be my dissertation. But between the cold I'm still fighting, my recent decision to minimize side projects from here on out and the ambiguity of the results I am just happy it is over! The paper will be to coauthors by the weeks end I can move on with my life! Moving things along feels so nice...

Writing date review

The writing date only lasted 3 hours, but it took me 3 days to get around to blogging the update about it. Typical.

The best news? It was successful! We met, got caffeinated and started writing. Each of us wrote around 400 words on our projects. I think the key was the environment combined with the goal. That makes sense, it was there in the Chronicle article laid out for us. It is comfortable to write in your office or at home surrounded by books, papers, and other resources. Without those things, there is nothing left to do but write. To be perfectly honest, I didn't really enjoy the writing without all of those things. I like getting sidetracked and following a thought through a trail of 5 pdfs. But it worked and the old Scmiance paper grew and grew. I also got distracted by email for a few minutes but the furious typing by my friends quickly got me back on track. Strength in numbers!
We are going to do this regularly so it will be interesting to see if it becomes more comfortable and/or stays as productive. The only difference will be where we sit. The back corner, near the window seemed great but it was frickin freezing, Mr. Biglesworth.

The Morning Paper

I read an article in The Chronicle recently about setting writing dates. It really reminds me of all those suggestions trashy magazines have about how to ensure that you work out for your Best Beach Bod Ever! You know... you will feel guilty if you back out on a friend that you arranged to go to the gym with, but you will happily hit snooze and back out on yourself.
Well, I am tired of backing out on myself, not feeling productive when I write and want to be more supportive of my friends so we are trying it. Tomorrow morning at 8:30-ish, Sneks, Hamster_grrl and I are meeting at chain-cafe-with-excellent-orange-scones. We will have 3 hours of writing. No gossip, no email, no problems with calling each other out for sneaking into email or staring off into space. I sent off revised-manuscript-version-4 to my coauthor today so am free and clear for the next project, although there are still two in the running for my attention. Check back tomorrow to see how it went!