Dissertatin'

I swear I will write about the wedding at some point. It was cool, but exhausting, and I plan on never having another one again.

Today I am here to write to you about dissertating. The fast approach of May, my final and personal deadline for graduating, has lit a fire under me and I have been working away and getting surly when my work is interrupted. I really wish now that I was independently wealthy and could just write, and not walk dogs or teach, or any of that other nonsense. However this is not in the cards.

I have also had a breakthrough in the way I work. I think I have finally accepted the fact that I will always write a first draft, which I will then scrap and have to start over. I had 14 pages of my first chapter, but then I finally understood how it all came together so I opened a clean new Word document, and started afresh. I have been concentrating a lot on not letting what I already have written, or what I have in my outline, constrain good ideas or approaches that come up in my writing.

I know I talked about the book Writing Your Dissertation in 15 Minutes A Day before, as it really spoke to me. Lately, I have really been putting it into practice by creating a writing addiction, and doing my thinking through writing. I am thinking more interestingly than I have before, and I think my dissertation will be much stronger for the fact that I am being true to my own thought processes. I also think I'll write it faster as I am working the way that works for my brain, not based on how I think I 'should' work.