Mock Thesis Defense: Justifying Blogging When I Could Be Revising Essays

I have a serious need to repent.  I intended to write this post over a week ago, but here we are.  Let's be honest-I just collapsed after finals and fell off the radar.  But now it is time to get back in the game, and without further delay because my honors thesis is due January 16th.

I want to take a minute and comment on what I have learned from my mock thesis defense and from my latest post that goes over a draft of my final essay in my collection, "Snot and Untold Stories."  The mock thesis defense was done as a final presentation in my Thesis Writing class.  Another student who acted as my representative contacted Professor Burton and received some good questions to ask me, one of which was this: how do I justify spending valuable time blogging and focusing on the digital component of my thesis when I could spend that time doing much-needed revising?

It is a good question, and after my latest post highlighting concerns with my essay I am more equipped to answer it.

Since posting my latest draft, I have received a few great comments with invaluable feedback.  While I admit I have not had as many people comment as I would have liked, the comments I did receive were incredible.  Shara, who I connected with while in India, took a good chunk of time to give me some much-needed suggestions.  Had I not blogged about this draft, I would not have received that feedback.  In this case, blogging has actually aided me in the traditional revision process.

A second, less obvious benefit to blogging that I have discovered within the last few weeks, has been that I am held accountable to a "real" audience.  Within a day after posting my essay, the German friend I met on the bus mentioned in my essay, who I renamed Charley, contacted me and mentioned he read it.  My initial reaction was concern.  Had I really represented him accurately?  For all of my talk of authenticity, was I holding to it?  The truth is I fused a little bit of a later conversation I had with a history major friend to include a few of the Vietnam details.  By having this post I am acknowledging the fragile nature of storytelling while also being held accountable to an immediate audience.  This is not available in mainstream publishing.

In conclusion, while blogging and adding this digital component of my thesis can be time consuming and daunting, I am glad to have done it.  At the end of the day I would rather have my ideas shared and available to read than have them be perfect.

(Photo credit goes to cs.cmu.edu)

Self Publishing Thoughts

As Professor Burton has pointed out to me, I need to be working on the digital component of my personal essay project while I am drafting.  This way, I can promote my eBook and connect with a perspective audience before they are even finished.

I'm trying to get more connected with the writing networks available online.  I attended an online chat session a few weeks ago and found some of their blogs which have been a fantastic starting point.  I came across the blog Literary Lab, kept by writers Domey Malasarn, Scott G.F. Bailey, and Michelle Davidson Argyle.  In this blog, I found a great post on self publishing that is frank and honest about some of the ins and outs of self-publishing.  Here are some points I learned that I need to focus on as I think about my eBook.

Price- The author of this post argues that you need to put just as much time and funding into the professional look and editing of your book.  She really emphasized making the cover captivating.  I've got some photographs, but I wonder if I should start looking at this more seriously, and sooner than i thought.

And off of that point, I was not planning on charging anything for this eBook.  To me it was more important to just get the information out there and promoting my first publication than to make any money.  This blog post also talked more specifically about how much it cost to make her first book and how much she made in the end.

If self publishing book is what I want to do in the future for a career, then this would be really important to learn sooner than later.

Publishing?

I remember my painting teacher in Hawaii sitting on his bench, eating Cheetos with chopsticks, instructing us students to always remember that you cannot paint abstractly until you have mastered the tools of the realistic realm.  In other words, you cannot break rules until you know what they are.  For a moment I'd like to apply that to publishing.

Let's be honest.  I am an undergraduate student with just one pending publication, and I don't know the first thing about the publishing world.  I've been working on gathering material to write my travel essays that I can self publish in an eBook, but it was not until I talked to my new friend, Emily, that I realized that this might make regular publishing impossible.  The conventional publishing world may be dying, but do grad schools care about that?  Or am I expected to have some traditional something to slap onto my resume if I want to be taken seriously?  (I hate that). 

In Dr. Burton's last email (my field study faculty mentor), he gave me some links to some popular places online where you can self publish eBooks.  I've decided to do a quick review of these sites and where I might go from here:

Smashwords.com publishes and distributes eBooks where authors and publishers retain full control over how their words and published, sampled, priced, and solid.  If an author wants to charge (the site is free), they have that option to do that, or even change the price at will.  They claim to be the leading eBook publishing platform, and have over 45,000 eBooks published.  If you do decide to charge, Smashwords.com keeps a portion of the profit, but it is still much more than the author would get in a traditional publishing relationship.  They also say that some publishers can sweep up these eBooks and show that they are worth selling, but others have decided that they do not want to work with a mainstream publisher or wait around as their book languishes in obscurity.  They say it is a personal choice, and that Smashwords.com does not publish incomplete or unpolished books.  

Help

I know I proposed a lot of great things on this field study and for my recently approved honors thesis prospectus, but I have one itsy bitsy problem.

Drafting in the field is difficult.  I mean, really difficult.

Any ideas?  Do I just need to isolate myself and force it out of me?  Or does it need to simmer?

Photographs from Amritsar: The Golden Temple

Here are some photographs from my visits to the Sikh's Golden Temple I visited last week in Amritsar.  This was by far one of the best experiences I have had in India.  I've been trying to get more photographs up (and taken) as part of the create aim of this blog.  In addition I have created a flickr account.  I just joined, but if anyone has an account send me a friend invite.  Here is my new profile.  

Connecting: Writers Network

In an effort to do more social discovery and connecting based on Dr. Burton's last email, I did a bit of research and found an awesome free network for creative writers online!  It is called Writers-Network, and my profile is here if you are interested. 

Since I just signed up I cannot give a full report, but what I really like is that there are many members and you are able to post writing based on how much you comment on others writing- ensuring that there are discussions going on instead of just writing out in space.  You can create your own profiles, categorize your work so that they can be easily searched, join other writers fan page and follow their stream, etc.

For an experiment I posted a pretty rough draft of a poem I wrote while I was in Ghana last year.  I cleaned it up a bit, renamed it "Roads,"  and posted it on Writers-Network, just to get a general response and test to see what this site can offer.

It seems like it is going to be a great opportunity to connect with other creative writers and to receive some quality feedback on my writing.  If you are interested in creative writing (and I know there are a few of you out there that would enjoy this site), you should join!  Really!

Create: A Little More Than a Dog

Here is another building block to the create aim of my blog:

During the preparation course to come to India we had a lesson on ethics.  Among the plethora of hypothetical questions, this one was thrown out there:

 “What do you do if there is a stray dog starving near your home and your host family advises you not to feed it since they don’t want her puppies?”

In class I got on a bit of a soap box.  “We come from the land of Mickey Mouse and stuffed animals and tooth brushes for our dogs.”  From my experience in Ghana I felt like I had a new perspective.  I wanted the students to realize that this is not the same mentality that we will experience once we get to India.

I was firm.  Felt firm.  As much as I love puppies, the dogs in Delhi with their dangling tumor stomachs did not stir my blood.  I am not heartless—it is just different somehow.  I have felt really good about living with Buddhists who do not believe in killing, even insects (even really, really big insects in my room), and I’ve gotten by just fine so far without getting my heart strings wrung.

Until last week.

French Fries and Field Studies

Here is another little something for the create aim of my blog.

It is called a French fry.  It looks like a French fry—but alas, it is not a French fry.  

In the same way that Skype is almost like seeing people from back home, the toilets are seemingly functional, and English hopes to be standardized among English speakers across the globe—a French fry is just not a French fry here in McLeod Ganj, because, well, it is just not home.  

This has been one of the largest frustrations I’ve had with this location for a field study.  Maybe it is because I keep comparing it to Ghana (which I recognize is a bad move—apples and oranges), but I have found that living in a village without the possibility of such luxuries is easier to stomach than having the possibility of them taunting you—posing as something familiar, but in reality, being more foreign than you could ever imagine.  I have no problem with being in unfamiliar territory and living without French fries, cell phones, hot showers, flushing toilets, and electricity for months or years of my life, but why are they pestering me here?

In “Street Hauntings,” a personal essay by Virginia Woolf, she identifies with a moth batting at flames or a light bulb—constantly trying to get to the core, but always condemned an outsider.  I can’t help but feel I can also relate in this moment.  Last night I was keenly aware of it.

I got home later than usual and decided to sit in the back room with my host sisters to watch some of their Hindi soap operas.  Bonding time.  I tried to squat next to them.  One sister insisted that I take her seat cushion.  I wouldn’t take it.  Neither did she.  It stayed on the floor between us.

Snot and Stories

I have a snot flinger for a host grandma.  We sit on the balcony together while I read and she flings visible amounts of mucus off of the second story of our complex with one swift motion with the back of her hand.  The leftovers she wipes underneath the chair without shame.  She is an eighty something year traditional Tibetan woman with unusually large pupils, long wire-like hair, and has facial features oriented not unlike a Picasso portrait.  I speak no Tibetan.  She speaks no English.  The barrier is so blatant it feels physical sometimes, reminding me that India, like all of us really, seem to be both defined and divided by religion and language.  

Our language setback does not discourage her from trying to communicate in some way or another.  The first week I was here she came walking into my room with a pair of woolen mittens.  She tossed them on the chair, looked up and appeared in shock that I was actually in the room, and backed out.  That was all.  The next week my host sister removed the mysterious mittens from my room.  

The next morning she stuck a bracelet on my arm, her wrinkly hands shaking as she tried to tie it securely on my wrist.  I did not know what to say.  I didn’t even know if it was actually for me or not.  I tried to show my appreciation with an awkward side hug, and that was probably the beginning of our relationship, because later that afternoon she felt free to tell me to move to a seat farther away from her because she was expecting a family friend within the hour.  

This woman walked across the Himalayas to escape Tibet, but now she cannot walk down the congested street without waving her cane at oncoming traffic in a futile effort to get them to stop.  I want to talk to her, but no one translates.  She is a walking coffin of untold stories.  Probably a bit senile too, but there is still something about her that makes me want to sit near her and soak in her narrative.

For now, we are just balcony friends.  Me with my books and half formed thoughts.  Her with her snot and silent stories. 

Virginia

Aurm and Palm Reading

I met a gem of an informant last week.  He fits nowhere in the skeleton plan I had for my travel essays, but somehow gets his own category as an “unforeseen character.”  His name is Aurm, and he is a local shopkeeper from Nepal who sells traditional flutes to tourists.  Don’t tell him that though.  He hates being labeled as a “tourist hassle.”  

In fact, Aurm hates most things.  The ever rising pollution and symphony of horns from constant traffic, people who don’t care to hear his music that he actually writes and cares about, McLeod Ganj and his situation in life in general, the visa process, his ex wife, the litter in abundance, and particularly books and movies, which he sees as necessary for stupid people who need to have “a way to dumb down reality.”  From there he will motion to the street, “See this?  You have all the drama you’ll ever need right here.”  

There is something savory about his bitterness—a man better than his circumstances who is keenly aware of it.  Aurm seems nothing short of brilliant.  He speaks ten languages, writes music inspired by peoples voices, carves his own flutes, has great one liners, and enjoys reading palms in his spare time.

This is what mine says.  Apparently.

The first thing he noted was a freckle on my right palm.  “You will inherit a fortune,” he says.  I laughed.  I’d love to know where that is coming from, because I don’t foresee it.

“You are like water.”

“Like what?”

“Water.  Your feelings are like water.  Always on the move.  Restless and sneaky, going from one place and relationship to the next whenever it gets difficult.”

“Hmm… okay.  Go on.”

To Do or Not to Do

Hamlet was an idiot.  To be or not to be is a worthless question.  But to do or not to do?  Now that is really something.

               

 I’m a Mormon.  Maybe you are too, but likely not (if you are, then never mind, it just means I’ve failed again at this whole “connect” thing). Whatever you are, there is a well known story floating about LDS primary rooms and Sunday school chapels about the origin of our best known song, “I am a Child of God.”  The original version was changed from “teach me all that I must be” to “all that I must do.”  Why? It is not about being (I think, therefore I am, right?—but don’t tell the Buddhists I said that).  It is about doing.

 I could do a lot of things right now.  I’m in India; almost as far away as humanly possible from the place I sometimes consider home.  Some people call that America.  I call it the United States.  

 I could tell you all day about who I am being right now—that is easy. I’m being a twenty something year old, very confused child of God (since I already brought it up), lured far away from the comfort of familiarity, plopped down on this wood framed bed in Dharamsala India wondering what I should be doing right now.

See, and already we are merging into the doing.  What am I doing?  What should I be doing?

I can tell you what I thought I was doing.  I thought I was coming here to do an awesome field study project which would give me material for a honors thesis which would get me into a great masters program which would get me some job that I can’t seem to figure out which would all add up into this great awesome life experience that could never have happened if I did not follow these steps exactly. 

 Sounds great, right?  I think so too.  So remind me one more time how I get off this bed, leave this room, and manage to do something that will contribute to that? 

 Once you venture out of the big abstract words like freedom, achievement, adventure, and experience, it gets a little less triumphant sounding.  I could go to the “Movies and Momos” activity that some of my group members are going to, but that would imply a risk of disappointment.  Last time I went it was canceled.  And remember I don’t speak a lick of Tibetan.  It also means walking (and by walking I mean hiking up the Himalayas, literally) to the other side of town.  This is also a risky activity, considering the main roads are more like half a lane but manage to fit two cars, random cows, and lots of pedestrians filling in whatever gaps are left. 

 Maybe that is not so much what I am afraid of.  Maybe I just love the terrible urine smell from the bathroom next door or the playful fly running into my computer screen like the first three hundred times never happened so much that I would never think of doing anything else.  Besides, the constant pain in my intestines from some unknown source(s) is the perfect excuse for bed rest.  Who would want to leave this place?

 It’s depression or something, isn’t it?  That is so simplified.  Loneliness, but closer to lost.  Maybe it is the boyfriend.  Or that feeling I used to get when I surfed and caught a wave wrong—that terrifying feeling of being flung under a vengeful wave like the inside of an off balanced washing machine, where up is down and down is up and you have no idea which way to start swimming before you run out of breath.  Hmm, sounds like suicide, but that would give Hamlet too much credit. 

To do or not to do?  Let’s go back to the being question.  At least I know the answer. 

Virginia

Rethinking Consume, Create, and Connect

I am starting to at least think about getting more settled in here in Mcleod Ganj, India, and as part of that I need to think more seriously about my course contracts.  I think by outlining it here I can work out my thoughts and feel less overwhelmed in general.

Course contracts are independent classes that field study students set up with faculty at BYU that work to get students credit within their major but also enhance their experience in the field as well.  Ideally, they are supposed to compliment the projects they have developed.  As part of my ten credits, I am taking a 3 credit Digital Culture class with Dr. Burton, my faculty mentor.  We still have yet to flesh out what it is I need to be doing entirely, but it is based on three aims that I have outlined in my blog intent. Consume.  Create.  Connect.

After an email response from Dr. Burton I realized that I needed to get a little bit more of an understanding of these points.  I have since revised my blog intent to include a few things.  Create is more than just creating the way I have already done in Ghana.  I also need to increase my online presence, figure out how to create things so that they are available to others, and find collaborators.  It should go hand in hand with "connect," which is where I need the most growth.  While this will be the most difficult, it will be the most rewarding if I can stretch beyond my mere one person undergraduate experience and share what I am learning with people who can actually benefit from it.  These three aims need to be just as present as my avatars.  

Something else I will be doing for my Digital Culture class is following the Digital Culture Blog and connecting with students who are currently in the classroom back in Provo.  

So yes, keep an eye out for that.  Also, I had one friend email me to mention that she does not comment on my blog because it is a class assignment and was not sure I wanted my professors to see.  I want EVERYONE to know that this is a place where both the personal and academic sphere are coming into one blog.  As part of connect I would love nothing more than to hear from you.