finnlongman

[finnlongman]

Cropping the blurbs from your wraparound covers and putting them next to each other like this is a great way to discover they do NOT have the same layout.

Anyway, here's what you'd see if you picked these up in a bookshop. Which you can already do for the first two, if you live in the UK or Ireland and your local bookshop doesn't hate me :) And very soon you will be able to find all three! Please consider pre-ordering Moth to a Flame via your local bookshop (or via literally anywhere that sells it, I'm really not fussy).

#here's a fun game: guess which of these blurbs I (mostly) wrote #authors do not typically write their own cover copy #but i did write parts of these and one of them almost entirely #the butterfly assassin #the hummingbird killer #moth to a flame #i also wrote the 'in a city ruled by killers / survival can be deadly' tagline #proud of that one tbh

[finnlongman]

Lads, I have endured an absolute immram today. A two hour drive to Oxford turned into over six hours and involved 75 mins on a motorway verge in the pouring rain, a tow truck, a taxi, and two unplanned trains. With a wheelchair. True to voyage tale tradition, we lost a member of the party in Northampton, but three of us eventually arrived at our destination.

I've never been more grateful that my wheelchair a) folds and b) has quick release wheels, enabling it to be squished into very small spaces when necessary. Also incredibly grateful to have had it with me at all, because 75 mins on a motorway verge in a chair wasn't great, but it would have been much much worse if I'd had to stand.

I'm meant to be giving a paper at the Ox-Cam Celtic Colloquium tomorrow. Fingers crossed the chair means that although I'll probably be fatigued, I won't be in any more pain than usual. Hell of a baptism by fire for my first time taking a wheelchair on a train, though.

And apologies to the Oxford bookshops I did NOT manage to visit today. Perhaps I can escape during the lunchbreak of the colloquium...

#about the author #we are going to compose an immram about this

[finnlongman]

Three weeks today!

[full details / pre-order links]

#moth to a flame #the butterfly assassin

[finnlongman]

I HAVE SUBMITTED MY FIRST-YEAR PHD REGISTRATION PORTFOLIO

My largest deadline is met and I am freeeeeee (except I have to finish writing a conference paper by Saturday, ideally by Friday, and also I have a book out in 3 weeks and should probably do some promo?)

#finn is not doing a phd

[finnlongman]

An update on my referencing conundrum: I've decided to use my department's deeply annoying stylesheet on this occasion and do my citations manually for the sake of getting my registration portfolio submitted on time. However, I'll be experimenting with Zotero and manually inputting all of my undigitised sources into there for the sake of potentially being able to use it at a later stage, to aid in the creation of a bibliography and for the sake of reference management.

Now all I need to do, other than the tedious relocation of punctuation and publication info, is figure out how on earth to cite an edition of something from 1677 when I only have a poorly digitised version of it for reference. Because, you know, it's from 1677. It does not follow nice sensible modern conventions re: providing publication information. I'm frankly surprised it's printed and not a manuscript, given how little Irish-language printing there is at this stage.

#finn is not doing a phd

[finnlongman]

I'm having a citation crisis and could use some advice.

I have the choice to use my department's stylesheet (designed for medieval studies but primarily for historians; requires manual citations and is also a huge pain), MHRA (not designed for medieval studies; can use Zotero), or MLA (I think this is in-text citations and thus not suitable for my needs; can use Zotero).

Whatever I choose, I will be doing the bulk of my footnotes manually, because I have a lot of abbreviated textual references that look like this

and this is, frankly, not something that referencing software can handle, and writing all of these out in full would double my wordcount and be completely unreadable.

Nevertheless, I would ideally like to use Zotero for my initial footnotes, if only because it'll make creating a bibliography a lot easier, and encourage me to ensure everything's been added to my library for later reference so I don't have to spend hours tracking things down later on. True, I have a large number of non-digital materials that have to be manually inputted, so this is not wildly convenient, but doing that now will make it easier than trying to find the publication info for a library book that's out on loan to somebody else at the last minute.

However. While this is fine for secondary material/articles etc, I have no idea how to go about setting up all my primary texts in Zotero. I need to distinguish between those which are only edited, and those which are edited and translated, in order to make it clear which translations are my own. But while it's easy enough to say (ed.) or (ed. and trans.) when manually citing, I ... don't know how to do that using Zotero?

Because the only way I can figure out how to list both roles is to list the person twice:

But obviously this is unsatisfactory since your footnote ends up reading ed. O'Rahilly, C., trans. O'Rahilly, C., and then you have to manually adjust them all anyway.

There seems to be no way to create a single role of 'editor and translator', and if I don't include that information, it's going to be a pain later. It essentially doesn't distinguish between a modern edited book and an edited medieval text, but those are in fact very different things.

UGH. I don't know what to do. The only stylesheet I have access to that actually provides information on how to handle medieval sources is the department one, but it's a) the worst, and b) genuinely just such a bad experience to interact with, like, it's essentially an essay about references with examples rather than a proper stylesheet.

Go away, this is not the time, I don't care, just tell me how to format this!

#gradblr #medieval studies #celtic studies #finn is not doing a phd #this is going to take longer than writing this entire portfolio did

[finnlongman]

I've almost finished putting together my portfolio for Registration (the process by which a probationary PhD student gets confirmed as an actual PhD student at the end of their first year in Cambridge; different unis have different terms for this). It includes a draft table of contents, which I thought might be of interest, so here's what I'm currently claiming I intend to cover:

Draft Table of Contents

Introduction:

Definitions of friendship (philosophical and literary) Introduction to corpus and manuscripts/editions Review of prior scholarship

1. Verbal affection and the language of friendship

1.1 Popa 1.2 Comalta, comhdhalta, dalta and oide 1.3 Cara, caratrad,and cairdes

2. Oaths and service

2.1 Friend and avenger: Conall Cernach and Cú Chulainn 2.2 Friends from abroad: cara as ally 2.3 Sworn brothers?: Cú Chulainn and Láeg

3. Bodies and bonds: physical affection and markers of friendship

3.1 Shared graves and homes 3.2 Kissing and physicality in the Irish tradition 3.3 Courtly love and the presence/absence thereof in Irish prose 

4. Virtuous friendship

4.1 Critique and guidance: the philosophers’ ‘true’ friendship vs sycophancy 4.2 Classical and/or Christian virtue: friendship and society 4.3 Dangers and failures of friendship

Conclusion:

Nature of friendship in the Irish tradition and its expression in my corpus Summary of reasons for change/development Further work to be done

Of course, this is not very informative, because each of these headings (whether deeply vague or highly specific) is serving as a placeholder concept for a broader idea or theme: the chapter about Conall and Cú Chulainn, for example, is looking at more aspects of their relationship than simply Conall as Cú Chulainn's avenger, though it will be using Oidheadh Con Culainn as a starting point. Many characters and relationships will recur repeatedly in different sections -- I anticipate Fer Diad coming up in 1.2, 1.3, 2.2, 3.2, and 4.3 at the very least, and Láeg will be discussed throughout, too.

In theory, if each sub-section is around 5,000 words, then each chapter will be 15,000 words, which means my chapters will come to 60,000 words overall and leave 10,000 words each for the Introduction and Conclusion. In practice, however, I suspect that strict 80,000-word limit is going to be an absolute pain and I am going to spend half of third year trying to make everything shorter 😅

#finn is not doing a phd #for anybody wondering what i am not doing my phd on

[finnlongman]

Well, that's conclusive. I guess I am officially Not Doing A PhD for at least another 2.5 years. At which point I will hopefully be actually not doing a PhD because I will have done the PhD, past tense. I suppose then I'll have to find another way to be in denial about my continued engagement in academic research.

It's lucky I don't research anything actually important or proprietary or worldchanging, because I am constantly posting my research discoveries on here as soon as I make them (and while they're still in-progress) instead of waiting until they're written up and published and if anybody else in the world cared about my topic they could steal my ideas so easily 😆

But this is a friendly reminder that anything tagged as "Finn is not doing a PhD" is in-progress research so a) might develop/change as I learn more and b) should preferably not be repeated without credit as these are my own discoveries and theories!

(I don't want to accidentally spread misinfo via new ideas and I also don't want to get accused of plagiarism down the line because somebody posted my new theory on a blog somewhere before I published it lol.)

#finn is not doing a phd

[finnlongman]

PACING IS ABOUT LOAD BEARING WALLS.

*staples violently to my own forehead*

#writing #stories #all writing advice is a tool and not a rule and there are no universal rules about pacing #but 'is your story doing what you personally want it to be doing' is as close to universal as you can get

[finnlongman]

My academic vibes are "in denial", apparently.

Needless to say that did, actually, turn out to be a masters thesis. Jury's still out on the other, since it only sprang into being in the past week and still has the potential to go absolutely nowhere...

#finn is not doing a phd

[finnlongman]

Emailed my potential supervisor with my not-a-PhD ideas which is the closest I've got so far to admitting it might actually be a PhD, so if you'll excuse me, I will be screaming for the rest of the day.

#*looks at past self judgmentally*

[finnlongman]

See, if you go back far enough in the PhD-denial tag, you reach the point where it was true

For someone who is Not Doing A PhD, I sure am sending a lot of emails to people asking for references.

#finn is not doing a phd

[finnlongman]

I will never again complain* about the Cambridge - London - Dublin - Donegal Town - Glencolumbkille journey... at least that doesn't involve stopping at two separate islands en route.

Although this year I am doing Cambridge - London - Belfast [for Ulidia Conference] - Enniskillen - Donegal - Glencolumbkille. Which is also long, but at least the first half and the second half are happening at totally separate times, and also I'm taking it nice and slow and stopping in Donegal for a night to avoid Bus Stress™. Because Bus Stress™ is the worst.

Next month I'm going to Brest for the Celtic Students Conference and I need you to know that my journey involves a bus/taxi, two trains, a tube, a car, and two ferries, at minimum, plus an overnight stay. It's Cambridge - London - Poole - Guernsey - St Malo (via Jersey) - Brest. It's unhinged. It's going to take about 36 hours. I'll arrive at 11pm having left Cambridge at lunchtime the day before. I will have spent almost the whole day enduring Ferry Shenanigans.

(On the way home it's marginally shorter, since the ferry doesn't go via Jersey and thus I might be able to get home from Poole the same day instead of staying overnight again. Seriously, why does it go via Jersey?)

Anyway, if I seem a little tired when giving my paper on the first day of the conference, it is because I will have endured an entire immram to get there. And unfortunately I get very seasick. 😬

#*i will definitely again complain

[finnlongman]

Next month I'm going to Brest for the Celtic Students Conference and I need you to know that my journey involves a bus/taxi, two trains, a tube, a car, and two ferries, at minimum, plus an overnight stay. It's Cambridge - London - Poole - Guernsey - St Malo (via Jersey) - Brest. It's unhinged. It's going to take about 36 hours. I'll arrive at 11pm having left Cambridge at lunchtime the day before. I will have spent almost the whole day enduring Ferry Shenanigans.

(On the way home it's marginally shorter, since the ferry doesn't go via Jersey and thus I might be able to get home from Poole the same day instead of staying overnight again. Seriously, why does it go via Jersey?)

Anyway, if I seem a little tired when giving my paper on the first day of the conference, it is because I will have endured an entire immram to get there. And unfortunately I get very seasick. 😬

#the whole trip is costing significantly more than i expected #and i am slightly regretting not presenting online after all #because it's going to be about £600 minimum for this and it could have been... free #less fun. but free. oof.

[finnlongman]

Also I should probably get over my denial of Currently Being In Academia and update my tag, shouldn't I?

It's lucky I don't research anything actually important or proprietary or worldchanging, because I am constantly posting my research discoveries on here as soon as I make them (and while they're still in-progress) instead of waiting until they're written up and published and if anybody else in the world cared about my topic they could steal my ideas so easily 😆

But this is a friendly reminder that anything tagged as "Finn is not doing a PhD" is in-progress research so a) might develop/change as I learn more and b) should preferably not be repeated without credit as these are my own discoveries and theories!

(I don't want to accidentally spread misinfo via new ideas and I also don't want to get accused of plagiarism down the line because somebody posted my new theory on a blog somewhere before I published it lol.)

[finnlongman]

Sounds fun! I know almost nothing about X-Men but I enjoy seeing people do creative things with Irish material and put it into new contexts 🥰

Tumblr is so lucky to get to witness the cutting edge of Celtic Studies research in real time (me and my friends being weird about medieval texts on the internet)

#i always have to filter out crossovers when browsing on ao3 #because people use what used to be the irish mythology for anything with fairies etc #táin bó cúailnge has its own tag though #i don't know if i've seen any crossovers in that tag! #anyway i miss things by virtue of the poorly disambiguated tags

[finnlongman]

👀 Do tell me more...

Tumblr is so lucky to get to witness the cutting edge of Celtic Studies research in real time (me and my friends being weird about medieval texts on the internet)

#do you think i have to stop reading ulster cycle fanfic until after TRWTH is out #so that I don't accidentally steal anything #that would be so tragic. surely the rules don't apply to retellings