Although I have my own brand new shiny gorgeous blog now, I still have a couple of posts coming out elsewhere. The first is on the Policy Press blog and is about finishing the book and starting AcWriMo (aka Academic Writing Month). The second will be out on the Research Whisperer blog next week.
If you want to read my earlier blog cuckoo posts, you can find links to them here.
I am already very excited about the 8th of May 2015. Because, on that day, I will be at a conference on Creative Research Methods, run by the Social Research Association, at the British Library. And my next book will be launched there!
So why am I saying ‘four weeks to go’ when it’s clearly six months away? Because there is just one month to go to get your abstracts in, if you want to present your work at this conference and earn yourself a hefty discount on the cost in the process.
I’ll let you know when we’re open for registration – should be in the next week or two.
I took part in a live online “hangout” on 23 October, for Vitae, an international programme dedicated to the professional development of postgraduate and early career researchers. I was part of a panel of doctoral researchers and PhD graduates discussing things we wish we’d known when we started out. It was great fun, with questions pouring in about how to be original, when to start writing, how to manage relationships with supervisors, how much data to collect – all the kinds of preoccupations of early-stage doctoral students. The panel had loads of ideas for ways to address these topics, and the time seemed to go past in a flash. We weren’t able to deal with all the questions during the panel, so the nice people at Vitae put the rest into a document and we’ve made some more suggestions there.
Find out more on the Vitae website, or just watch the video below:
These are the kinds of tweets that warm an author’s heart – thank you, Amanda Taylor!
(It also shows one of my lovely bookplates, designed by Carol Burns. If you’ve got a copy of my book and would like a signed bookplate, please get in touch and let me know. No charge.)
For the last couple of years I have been a blog cuckoo, laying my wordy eggs in other people’s blog nests. Here is a round-up of the posts I’ve made elsewhere.
I began on the British Library‘s Social Science blog, writing on ‘What do practitioners need to know about research?’
Then I went to the Policy Press blog and wrote about the covert censorship of Gold Open Access.
On Eva Langsoght’s blog, PhD Talk, I wrote about managing the research process.
Then on Sukh Pabial’s blog I wrote on how to unlearn separatist learning.
On the NVivo blog I wrote about how to add value to your research with diagrams and models.
Most recently I’ve been back on the Policy Press blog, beginning a series on ‘a year in the life of an academic writer’. So far I’ve covered me and my books, why another blog on academic writing?, where a book begins, how much pre-writing research you need to do, three compromises you have to make when writing a book, the difficult second book in a genre, dealing with reviewers’ comments, and impostor syndrome. And now I intend to continue that series here. Though I may still write for other blogs from time to time. Maybe even yours.
Helen Kara 