Dear reader, if you haven't written a dissertation, let me tell you, it's a lonely lonely business. And if you have written a dissertation (I hate you), you know what I'm talking about (wanna write mine?). So bear with me. Or skip this post. Because it's all dissertating all the time.
So I've been working on my dissertation. All right, in all honesty I work a couple minutes a day. But that's still working. So I've been working on Chapter 2, which explores the implications of the theorizing in Chapter 1. (No, my diss is not a standard English dissertation, but that shouldn't surprise you.) And, of course, a dissertation is all about the kind of positioning and gatekeeping that Dr. Crazy has posted about recently. But I hate all that positioning-one's-self-in-the-field crap, so I've been drafting the chapter without it, figuring I'd add that crap in after I had the basic sections and ideas laid out. Then I'd worry about positioning when I saw the scope of the whole chapter, I figured. So I wrote and wrote and it grew to chapter length (40ish pages). Then I figured it was time to make those decisions.
Hand-wringing. Whine and double whine. And then I said: NO! I want to write Chapter 4!
And so I made a major decision: I'm writing through. I'll go ahead and clean up the writing and organization of Chapter 2 and send it to my advisor, but I'm not going back and revising or anything. I need to see the whole. I need to work on Chapter 4. And that's the new plan.
Since I decided on it on Wednesday when I started whining to my Diss Coach that I wanted to get onto Chapter 4 already (the fun chapter), I've been working on it pretty steadily. I work for a while on fixing up Chapter 2 and then make notes for Chapter 4. I also looked at Chapter 3 and saw that it wasn't in the kind of shape I had hoped it was, but I'll go back into it and expand it later. Onward!
I think I will be able to graduate in August!
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