TWO WEEKS! My dissertation is due in TWO WEEKS!
I finished the revision of chapter 4 this morning. I was planning to have it done yesterday evening but didn't quite get there. I needed one more hour. So it's done and sent to both my dissertation writing group and my chair. The first half seems okay to me. The second half is still a little messy.
I'm going to take a break, wrangle some lunch, and then start reading the disaster that is chapter 3. I'll try to formulate a revision strategy for that chapter this afternoon.
How's everyone else doing? Seems pretty quiet on the DBC front.
Hi all. So my chair (who lives in a different state) has had my revised first two chapters for about a week now. She told me that she would get back to me on Monday about the first chapter (my lit review).
As of this morning, I still hadn't heard from her.
Now, she has a baby, a pretty old dog, and it's the end of her semester. these all seem like valid reasons for not finishing my chapters. but, in my dissertation-induced insanity, I decided that the chapters are SO BAD that she couldn't figure out what to say to me. That it was taking her MUCH longer than she had anticipated because of all of the very long comments she had to write.
I have literally been breaking out in hives (something I do when I'm stressed. Fun.). So I finally emailed her today telling her that I didn't need the comments -- I'm working on chapter 3 next -- but that I really needed her to tell me whether or not the first chapter was total crap and needed overhaul.
Happily, it doesn't (need major overhaul). she read it today and it's in good shape. There are nitpicky things throughout--clarifications, fleshing out, rewordings--and one major thing I need to do (write a few new pages on feminist pedagogy), but all of it can, i think, be done in a day.
Whew.
I'm trying to finish the revision of chapter 4 today. It might take me until tomorrow morning, but I think it's possible to get it done today. We'll see. I'm here until 6 today, with one 1/2 hour coffee break in about an hour. Cuz that's what I need: MORE COFFEE!!!
Anyway, to those of you out there who aren't yet sending chapters to chairs, let me just say that waiting for comments, at least for me, is agonizing. But near the end of the process, when your chair or committee members start saying, "hey, this looks good," . . . well, that doesn't suck. :)
Write on, my friends.
Just trying to remain accountable here as my deadline creeps closer. This is just a comment about my progress, so feel free to skip it.
Although I do want to say that while it's not a scary dissertation photo, I can tell you about the very vivid and horrible nightmare I had a week or two ago. It's very Anne Lamott. In it, I had to turn in the rough draft of my dissertation and that's what I had to defend. My rough drafts tend to be freewrites and chapter 3, in particular, is an absolute disaster, but for some reason that's all I had, so that's what I gave to my committee. It was awful. In part because it was so completely plausbile.
On a more positive note, my friend Kelly (whose not on this blog, but still) successfully defended her dissertation in comp / rhet yesterday. It can be done!
As for me, I talked over chapter 4 with my chair and she doesn't seem to think it's as much of a mess as I think/thought it is/was. I need to rewrite the last section and expand on that, condense and reorganize a good chunk, be more consistent in my terminology, and work on organization. I'm planning to revise it and send it back to her by May 1st.
And then I'm planning to panic because we'll be into May and my diss is due on the 21st.
Yep, there's that rising feeling of panic again. Dissertating cannot be good for one's health.
I don't typically look at the site meter that's attached to this blog . . . who's got the time? But I did recently, and I find that the search terms to get here can be quite amusing. The funniest of late? "Scary bootcamp pictures."
I wonder what that might look like for us?
5:00-6:00?! In the morning?!!! Yikes! Exclamation points!!!
I'm more of a late morning, afternoon sort of person. I only see 5 or 6 in the morning if I need to catch a plane.
As for my writing schedule, there's my intended schedule and my actual schedule. I always intend to get up around 7 or 8, get to the grad carrels by 8 or 9, and write until 11:30 or 12 (for lunch or a meeting). The rest of the day depends on the day, as I work in the writing center on Wednesdays from 1-2 and have meetings every other week. But generally I'm back in the grad carrels by 2:30 on meeting days, by 1:30 on non-meeting days, and I write until about 4:30-5.
That's the idea, at least.
In practice, it goes a little more like this: I get up around 8:30 - 9:30, get to the grad carrels by 10, screw around for a half an hour checking email and playing scramble on facebook, write for an hour and a half or so, then go to lunch and/or meetings. I get back to the grad carrels by 2 and write for a few hours.
then feel guilty for the rest of the evening because I'm not writing enough.
SO, I'm really trying this week to be more focused when I'm in the grad carrels, and to work after dinner (which is particularly difficult since my significant other doesn't have to bring work home with him). So tonight I'm reading over chapter 2 and trying to make a few changes so I can send it to my chair. If I could do that tonight, she'd have my intro and first two revised chapters. And I'd feel pretty good about that.
Which means I should go back to work.
OK, I left this in a comment to Abby below, but since you guys are doing it, I'm going to post my own, too.
My writing has slowed over the past month or so. A lot. I'm waiting on feedback from a number of people on a couple of chapters and I can't seem to get it together to write without knowing where I am (in terms of where they think I am). I hate being dependent like that . . . but there you go. I did talk with advisor the other day, and he has agreed that my initial diss plan was waaaaaaaay too ambitious given the constraints of a dissertation. We have agreed to trim the work back to something manageable and finishable . . . and I could not be happier about that decision. I was drowning in data. The data, however, can be used elsewhere . . . and that's the second part of our plan.
I'm still unsure exactly how to proceed now without that feedback, but my writing plan is to start tomorrow on the "findings and analysis" chapter and just base that work on the case studies. Ultimately that work will be useful even if it doesn't appear in that kind of chapter. We'll see.
So, similar to how Meagan describes her writing process, I am a writer who has to dump the words all over the page (or the Anne Lamott's phrasing, I have to "vomit" all over the page), then I go back and clean it up. Now isn't that a lovely image? ;-)
I'm slowly but surely working and writing. I'm working on the first data chapter (which I'm also writing with the goal of sending out for publication). I'm consistently getting a few pages down a day. They're rough, but that's how I roll. I'm meeting with my director later this week, so I'm hoping to have something more coherent by then. It could happen.
Just a quick update: I finished the revision of my lit review yesterday. I'm trying to work on my introduction today (I'm on page 8 of, I'm guessing, 12-15 -- brief intro) but I'm burnt. I'll keep trucking for a bit, but then have to go to the grocery store and do that other-life kind of stuff. That weird other realm that's NOT related to my dissertation, but includes things like dishes, grocery shopping, taking out the trash, lunch, and meetings.
How's everyone else doing?
