You'd think that it would be a relief that I got a rough draft of the final full chapter done. But all I can do now is try to work out how long it's going to take me to revise chapter 1 (answer: quite a while), outline the conclusion (aka Chapter 5), and revise chapter 4 when I get it back from readers. Will this never end?
I remember being told as an undergrad (or maybe was it high school?) that writing the introduction to a paper was the hard part. Not so with Chapter 4. The conclusion was the trouble spot. I think part of the problem is that I was getting tired and I didn't want to just cut-paste-and-thesuarus the introductory paragraphs of the chapter. I justified walking away from it by telling myself that the arguments might change a little bit in editing and revising, so it's ok to leave it for now.
I was reminded how dreadful it can be to go back and look at something that I wrote but haven't looked at in almost a year. Chapter 1 = ouch. I knew it was going to change significantly once 2-4 were mostly done, but still. I should have known from the scare I seem to have given my final reader with the amount of summarizing and periodic sentences used. I'll be happy if I get that all fixed up by Christmas.
With a Chapter 1 rewrite and the likely 2+ rounds of revision on Chapter 4 looming, my holiday season is once again going to be spent behind a computer and/or buried behind piles of library books. And this is the shortest holiday season that's possible. I'm defining 'holiday season' as Thanksgiving week-New Year's. As has been pointed out by newspeople, the time between Thanksgiving and Christmas aka holiday shopping season is as short as it can be this year. At least most of my shopping was done by Oct.8, my last day in the UK.
Now to figure out when to draft and-or cut-paste that cofnerence paper together...
No comments:
Post a Comment