Defense
Thesis defense was today. I passed conditionally. This means that though the story has some revision work for the future, it's nothing so bad as to require a full revision. Just typos and some grammatical errors I missed. I'm okay with that. And I'm okay with most of the suggestions about what to clarify and expand and the few suggestions of rearranging information to help the reader. I'm still worried about it becoming meta-writing and I'll try my darndest to avoid it.
But, I still need to revise the introduction. We didn't get much guidance about that part. Mostly, they want me to put things in a literary context. They want me to find scholarly sources to explain what referenced terminology means, show how my story falls under the genre of magical realism, and then compare my story with my bibliography entries to show what techniques and styles I used that are similar. They also wanted me to fix the bibliography by finding exact locations for the entries. Some of them just had "Printed in the United States" instead of a city. I already went through a nearby library's card catalog and found the information. Odd how it has proper reference information but Amazon.com doesn't in the stats and description sections. A couple of the entries I had to alter to be a different version of the book, like with The Jungle Book. But I doubt they care about that. I also have to include what genre my story falls under in order to explain how I intend to pitch it to a publisher in order for them to market it properly. Problem is, my story is a boundary story. It's fantasy, but realistic. And it's not overtly fantasy because it's magical realism. But I can't even use a panelist's suggestion of calling it a fantasy-realism hybrid without first finding scholarly articles that discuss hybrids in literature, specifically fantasy-realism ones, if any exist. >.< I wasn't aware that a creative writing thesis was still a research paper!
I have ten days. I can manage that. But really, I just want this over.
But, I still need to revise the introduction. We didn't get much guidance about that part. Mostly, they want me to put things in a literary context. They want me to find scholarly sources to explain what referenced terminology means, show how my story falls under the genre of magical realism, and then compare my story with my bibliography entries to show what techniques and styles I used that are similar. They also wanted me to fix the bibliography by finding exact locations for the entries. Some of them just had "Printed in the United States" instead of a city. I already went through a nearby library's card catalog and found the information. Odd how it has proper reference information but Amazon.com doesn't in the stats and description sections. A couple of the entries I had to alter to be a different version of the book, like with The Jungle Book. But I doubt they care about that. I also have to include what genre my story falls under in order to explain how I intend to pitch it to a publisher in order for them to market it properly. Problem is, my story is a boundary story. It's fantasy, but realistic. And it's not overtly fantasy because it's magical realism. But I can't even use a panelist's suggestion of calling it a fantasy-realism hybrid without first finding scholarly articles that discuss hybrids in literature, specifically fantasy-realism ones, if any exist. >.< I wasn't aware that a creative writing thesis was still a research paper!
I have ten days. I can manage that. But really, I just want this over.