JULY CAMP NANO 2023: FIN

Final Word Count: 33,948

What a month.

It’s been ok, a wild ride, and I’m not sure I’ve come out of it completely unscathed

I hope I can say it’s finished and ready to be read. I have some “beta” readers lined up; I just need to give them a heads-up that it’s coming, and I can rest for a while.

In case you’re wondering, my thesis title is:

Victoria’s Children: The Orphan Figure in Dickens’s Fiction

Here’s an excerpt from the Introduction

Orphans, then, are people, especially children, deprived of parental guardianship, affection, and privilege on any scale. This loss or deprivation can be physical, as in the loss of a parent by death or abandonment, or figurative/abstract, as in the neglect or overprotection of one or both parents or guardians. These definitions reflect one aspect of orphanhood: the solitude, fear, and unhappiness of being alone or abandoned.

 Orphanhood also suggests freedom from authority: a parentless, thus ruleless existence. Orphans have no one to protect them but also no one to disappoint. This paradox of the orphan condition–the fear and freedom of being alone in the world–is manifest in Victorian culture and literature. Whether we look at the Industrial Revolution, the evolution of the novel, or the specific novels of a particular Victorian author, we see both sides of this orphan condition: solitude, fear, a sense of abandonment, and uncertainty on one side, and independence, boldness, bravery, and creativity or ingenuity on the other.

-me

If you’d like to read the rest, send me a message. I’d love to discuss the topic with you. I am sick of writing about it.

As I did last year, I think I’m taking August off from the blog, but I did want to talk about a special event I have planned for Labor Day weekend:

Join my 1st CREATIVE INTENSIVE, Saturday, September 2nd

Here’s what we’ll do:

• 10-minute warm-up
• 45-minute focus (optionally broken into 3 15-minute parts)
• 5-minute cool down
• Sharing is optional for the remainder of time

I expect it to last from 75 to 90 minutes, and I will announce the official start time closer to the date.

If you’re interested, contact me for more details and the Zoom link.

see you there.

xxxlinsey