So, that mysterious news I alluded to at the start of the year is a little more concrete. In the past week I’ve signed a publishing agreement with Ashgate to produce a book based on my PhD thesis for publication in 2014!

And so now the tough business of sitting down and writing the damn thing has to commence. This, pretty fundamental, aspect will be super tricky; I’m procrastinator par-excellence, a right lazy mare. Thankfully, I wrote my thesis as a ‘proto-book’ and aside from a bit of updating and polishing, the process of completing the manuscript in draft – in theory – shouldn’t prove to be too much of a headache.

I’ve started this fearsome task by reading other people’s advice. Karen McAuley’s posts on PhD2Published inspired this blog post and I intend, just as she has done, to use my blog as a means of recording my progress. Expect me to post more frequently from here on in. Over the next couple of weeks I foresee that I will need to:

i) allocate a set time to each chapter – principally for editing, but especially in the case of later sections – research/updates;

ii) finalise images, seek and work out how to finance the necessary permissions;

iii) revisit consent forms and check that all my respondents and interviewees consented to their words being used in future publications (I’m sure they did, but I can’t currently locate the folder – might be under my bed!) and then contact them anyway, as a matter of courtesy.

After which I will:

iv) start working my way through each chapter with a fine toothcomb, editing out wordiness, inclarity, paring down footnotes and my typically over-zealous/cautious referencing, rechecking sources, etc.;

v) locate the various scraps of paper I’ve scribbled with notes since submitting my thesis;

and finally,

vi) update, re-write, research and write, as necessary.

Help.