disconcerted

[truepenny]

Item no. 3 can be crossed off the list, and I am striving with no. 4. The trouble it's causing me, you'd think I hadn't been writing academic papers for the past eleven years, and graduate level papers for the past seven.

Over on her journal, matociquala is pondering the difference between a novel and what she calls an "epic novel" (i.e., a novel over ~250k words). And what she says makes sense to me, not merely in terms of the analogue of short-story/novel, but also in terms of what I discovered when I started writing this blessed dissertation, which is that there's all the difference in the world between even a 40 page term paper (and I cranked out a couple of those) and a dissertation, which is definitionally a book-length manuscript. As Matociquala says about the difference between a novel and an epic novel, I was expecting it to be a difference in degree and it's not. It's a difference in kind. Which was an unexpected and exceptionally nasty shock to have smack me like a cold dead halibut across the face just after I'd passed my qualifying exams. It threw me off for quite a while.

It is also disconcerting to discover that in Jacobean London, "precious" was a common oath (short for "God's precious blood," according to the editors of The Atheist's Tragedy). It tends to make one think of Gollum at inopportune moments.

Comments

[oracne.livejournal.com]

When I turned in my Master's thesis, I told my advisor I didn't see how I would ever manage a disseratation. He said it's pretty much the same amount of work, only a little longer. Don't know if I agree or not. A big thesis IS longer than a paper, so I guess it counts as epic.

Never did get funded and write a disseration, so I never found out.