I’m baaaack! It’s been almost a month since I returned from my combined research and holiday trip to the UK (which I’m still calling a researchiday. Trust me, it’s the new bleisure) and I’m finally settling back into my normal non-travel life. I miss the midday pints. I do not miss the jet lag.
Lots of people have asked how my trip went. Did I find out everything I wanted to know? What was the most exciting discovery? If I was on a “research” trip, why was my Instragram full of pictures of me in pubs? Well, the answers to questions one and two are pretty closely related. And I’m taking the fifth on the third (which I’m not really entitled to do because I’m Australian, but let’s just skip over that… )
From both a practical (research, info, and resources) and creative (emotional connection, personal experience, and inspiration) perspective, I got a huge amount out of this trip. More than I expected, to be honest, as I only had a week in Manchester and wasn’t able to plan for that time as well as I would have liked. In spite of that, I came back with a metric butt tonne of new resources, ideas, and inspiration. I have a fat stack of brand-new books engulfing my desk. And I had an epiphany.
I needed to get my shit together.
All together.
And put it in a backpack.
All my shit, so it’s together.
OK, I went off on a bit of a tangent there. Which is kind of appropriate, because tangents were part of the epiphany. I’d been working on Mary Ann Britland’s story for 18 months and had amassed an obscene amount of notes, writing, and sources. And it was all over the place. I had notes in multiple notebooks, in Word docs, and in emails. I had dozens of double-up folders and hundreds of completely un-filed documents. I’d reached the point where I could honestly say that I knew more about Mary Ann Britland and her case than anyone else in the world, but it was more than I could even remember. Which wouldn’t have been a problem except that I also couldn’t find the info in my files.
It’s not surprising that I ended up in this predicament. This book, like any big project, is made up of thousands of little tasks, many of which I’m trying to do at the same time. But that’s the problem. If you can’t remember what you’ve already done and found, it’s hard to keep track of what you’re currently doing; it’s really hard to know what you should do next; and it’s almost impossible to figure out how to get the whole thing finished. It’s like wandering off a path and finding yourself in the middle of the forest with no map, no compass, not even any breadcrumbs. You try to keep pushing forward, but it’s damn easy to get distracted (or intimidated) by all those trees.
Pictured: Tree-ly doom at Alderley Edge.
My epiphany was that I needed to take some time out to round up all my notes, re-organise my files, revise my book outline (if you’ve never seen one, it’s just a breakdown of each chapter – what’s in it, its anticipated word count, and its deadline), and merge my many, many to-do lists. And that’s what I’ve done.
I got my shit together. All together. I put it in a backpack (well, a Trello board) and now I feel like I’m back on the path and no longer getting lost among the trees. Which is great, ’cause all that nature was murder on my sinuses.
I revised the shit out of that outline, too. The deadline for the first draft is now 22 April 2018 and it’s the most definite (and realistic) deadline I’ve had since finishing Honours. Hold me to it, guys, otherwise I’ll leave it all to the night before, uni-style ;P
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