Monday 8th July
G’day!
It has been a scorcher of a day and we are feeling it. After a long day yesterday and a good nights sleep, everyone was ready to hit the ground running, sort of! Sure enough, one of the students laptops (luckily a Queen’s student) decided to go on the fritz. Yep just stopped working. So it was a quick trip back into Kingston to get another hard drive and a mega screen. We are good to go.
It is interesting to see every year, how many of our doctoral students come to camp just a little bit exhausted. They are all brilliant in their work, but not so good at looking after themselves. My first rule of thumb is that you have to work on how to make time for your writing and other commitments (family, work) but you must also make time for yourself. If you are tired, take a nap. Being able to focus on your writing is that much harder if you are tired and often takes twice as long. Camp is about writing, but it is also about getting your energy levels back up and taking a nap when needed. I know, I took one!
These writing camps are a chance for each student to figure out, what time of day they write best at, is it for 2 hours longer or shorter before they need to get up and take a break, and what do I need to do to be ready to jump into it when I do sit down. This is not as easy as it seems, but this camp, in the beautiful grounds of QUBS, surrounded by their peers, is the perfect spot to find out how.
It was great to see some of the students at our peer discussion, help each other. For example data or archival materials, how to store them and organize them in a format that makes it easy to grab what is relevant for the area you are working on. How better is it to spend a bit of extra time in the beginning, to make it easier when you come to write and you are in the flow.
After lunch it was a quick trip into Chaffey’s Lock to make sure the ice cream place was still there! Afterall I have been espousing how awesome they are in all my emails. Luckily I hit the jack pot, so potential problem averted.
Tonight we had Susan Korba from Queen’s Student Academic Success Services. Susan has come to every Lake Shift to talk about the “Editing Process”. Writing is the first part, editing is the polish and final delivery. So thank you Susan again for being one of the camps Champions.
Lastly tonight we had our first fire down at Earl Cottage. I love it. What a great place for a chat amongst friends.
What is the animal count today?
Deer – lots of them on my way into Kingston and back.
Beaver x 1 possibly 2
Otters x not sure
Groundhogs x 2
Muscrat x 1
Big black snake x 1!