It's Official!

I have finished the dastardly Chapter 3! Which means that I have completed the first draft of my dissertation! Woohoo! Now if only I didn't have a big folder with comments from Peppy Advisor already. I haven't even opened it because it's too scary. And I'm not going to do that today.

Instead I have some project drafts to look at that I should've done a week ago, but in my sick ickiness did not get done. So I'm sitting in a local coffeehouse blogging instead of doing my work. Yay blogging!

Also y'all, I've totally appreciated the comments about my being a crazy speed demon on this draft, but really I just have a weird process. I do a lot of freewriting up front. Then I dig out the research that's useful (that I've already done). Then I sort of slap all that together in a document and try to figure out ways to arrange it. Then I mope for a while, trying to figure out some kind of arrangement. Then I freewrite some more. So when I say crazy things like "I wrote eight pages," what I mean is that I turned notes into sentences for eight pages. It is amazing, at least I think it is, but it's not the same as doing brain work. (Must graduate in August is my mantra!) Also, with one chapter in particular I didn't even bother writing things in academic discourse. I just couldn't do it. Of course, that's the chapter that has to be totally revised. I don't mean just rewritten, but totally re-envisioned and likely back to square one on research. Well, we'll see.

I really should get to these overdue drafts. Everywhere around Grad City are students with laptops or giant textbooks open, trying to make up the work of weeks and weeks. (Isn't that what I'm doing?) Don't they know that I've written a first draft of my dissertation and for at least an hour nothing can possibly be the same? Then again, things are the same. And these drafts aren't going to respond to themselves. Too bad really.