This afternoon, productivity = lying on sofa with laptop to update a lecture. Because verticality is not going to do it.

Should be back to more regularly scheduled programming (research, writing, actual WORK) soon I hope

New house is gradually becoming less of a part-time job. Today, there's only a damp survey, and it turns out that despite the stalactites of mold in some cupboards last week, it's less bad than I feared!

Tudor Historians Day

Excited to come to the beautiful West Horsley Place and talk about ladies-in-waiting this summer - Tudor Historians Day, Sunday 19th July, get your tickets here! westhorsleyplace.org/whats-on/tud...

Oh!!! Doh.

Thank you!!

Anyone got access to Peter Marshall, 'Religious exiles and the Tudor state', Studies in Church History 43 (2007) ? 'Request failed' at the BL

I could be a robin

Good point well made!

Yeah.... When I tried it I found it gave me 'don't tell me what to do' feels. Apparently I don't like being told when to breathe 😬

Yeah I thought as much for ADHD. Doesn't seem to play with tism either for me

There are pigeons nesting, interrupted by raucous parakeets, and I just caught a red bug biting me. Hmm. Itchy.

Woodland graveyard with pink blossom and bluebells

Not meditation per se but peace and counting bird noises. I have a thing for hanging out in graveyards and I've found the best one near-ish my new house. Not as big as Ladywell cemetery but more bluebell-y 🙂

Ohhh that makes sense!

You know the kind of overwhelm where everything feels like a demand including the things that are supposed to fix it. That.

ND friends, how do you feel about meditation? Does it work differently on us (or not work?) I don't have great memories of trying it.

Reintroducing student number redistribution is an easy fix that would actually stabilise the sector without even having to pump a load of money into it.

All unis are spending SO MUCH MONEY & RESOURCES on recruiting & advertising rather than teaching & research. Plug that leak. Stop that volatility.

We have moved, in my adult life, from "you can't trust Wikipedia because they don't even have any gatekeepers" to "we gotta rely on Wikipedia to hold the line because universities have been coopted"

I'm gonna try it this way anyway. I'll let you know how it's going 😂

How do other people research and write for different purposes? Fascinated by people's processes.

This feels very un-academic. I'm scared I'll miss things. I'm scared I won't find anything 'new' at all and I have very mixed feelings about becoming someone who writes a good story without any new research. But I'm also on a deadline and academia feels like it's dying, so bleh.

If I try to hop about between chronologies and events too much here I'll just get confused and frustrated.

So, I think for the first time ever, I'm going to aim to do my research chronologically, following the structure of the book.

I...don't think that's going to work this time. I could spend all summer gathering so much material without fully understanding what I'm looking at and whether it'll be relevant, and even academics aren't given the time these days to do that the way we used to.

I did a load of basic 'where are the stories' research, mostly in secondary lit, in order to write the proposal. I assumed that now I would go and gather all the immediately obvious archival stuff before I went anywhere near writing- like I did with the last book.

But. My new, current project is a different beast. It's fifty years out of my teeny lil academic comfort zone, archivally; it involves men as well as women and dear god the sheer volume of material is, um, a lot (bloody men).

I already knew what would be useful or not, I knew what I was trying to find, and the material itself was limited in volume (because women in archives is not the one). I could do any extra bits as they came up, writing chapter by chapter.

My first narrative history book, about Tudor ladies-in-waiting, grew out of previous work and had years of archival perusing stacked behind it. I knew the period so well that I could go and do another tranche of research and have it easily mentally organised before starting to write.

I still find that difficult. I still see a gap, a cool thing in an archive, and it usually takes me several proposal redrafts to really pull out the 'why' and spin it the way an editor wants to receive it.

In many ways it's not that different. There absolutely still needs to be a point, a 'why' to what you're doing, but I learned fast that the nature of the why was mostly about the market and what publishers think they can sell, so it's learning a new way to spin your work.

I became ok at that. Never honestly an argument-led researcher but I learned to see which gaps were worth trying to fill, how to spin a reason why etc.

Then I moved into writing narrative history for a broader audience.

I was someone who found archival research 'easy' (the obsessive terrier hyperfocus) but argument hard. Why must there be a point, couldn't people see this was cool for the sheer sake of it?

No. Lol. That's not being an academic. I learned. Painfully. And slowly.