I once saw Spalding Gray live, in Atlanta, performing the monologue Monster in a Box, about the tribulations of writing his first novel. It was at a time when I was wondering whether to even start doing a PhD on, never mind finishing it, which took a while. I’ve been reminded of this, and the image of the lumbering physical presence of the tome itself, because I have been hauling an unfinished manuscript of my own around for a few months now. Actually, I have been carrying it around on a USB stick. I am in Vancouver now, for a month’s ‘research retreat’, as I like to think of it. So the first thing I have managed to do is print the whole thing off – all 209,000 words of a first draft, more than twice as long as it’s meant to be. I’ve also been re-thinking the title. That’s progress, right?

I’m now sitting in libraries or coffee shops (not the beach), trying to cut it down and make it cohere and ensure it has lots of narrative continuity (all those things you tell PhD students to do as they approach the finishing line). The young man sitting next to me this morning reading  Poulantzas’s Fascism and Dictatorship provoked one of those “Oh no, I should probably say something about that”-moments that tend to beset you when you are trying to finish something like this (another way in which I feel like I’m trying to complete a PhD all over again, again). Last time I wrote a book all on my own the bits that I cut out of the final version, quite rightly, lived on as subsequently re-worked journal papers, and actually have ended up animating parts of the argument of this new book. So this time I think I might just blog the bits I cut out, so that I can slough off those spare thoughts and move on properly once it’s all done and dusted.

But maybe I’m getting ahead of myself. I’m off to sharpen the pencils.