truepenny | (no subject)

Met with dis. director.

(And, yes, the abbreviation with one 's' is a pun. "This is Hell, nor am I out of it.")

She thinks I really can be done by August, but I have got a shitload--I repeat, a shitload--of work to do if I'm gonna pull it off.

See, here's the thing. I have this alleged system for writing academic articles, wherein I do all the writing, all the argumentation, before I touch the secondary reading. There are pros and cons here, the pros being that I GET STUFF WRITTEN. I tend to get ensnared and entangled in secondary reading, so that I either (a.) never start writing at all or (b.) end up writing nothing but a lit. review, in which the discerning reader can discover what a whole host of other people think about the subject, but cannot find even a glimmer of what might be on my mind.

My alleged system works quite well for term papers, but is proving to have some flaws with regard to dissertations. (It's rather a pity that all the valuable lessons I'm learning about dissertation writing are completely and utterly USELESS to me, because, boy, if I ever wrote another of these puppies, I would be so on top of it.)

So here I am. I've got four chapters and a weird flourish; two of the chapters are moderately well-provided with secondary sources; two are not (and one of them is the Hamlet chapter *falls into a green and yellow melancholy*). And the flourish is a cultural history dingbat thing and needs more secondary reading than the mere mortal mind of man (or woman) can comprehend.

And then I've got the conclusion to write (on The Brotherhood of the Wolf and maybe Taymor's Titus Andronicus, yay!). And then, oh yeah, the introduction. More secondary reading.

Fuck me gently with a chainsaw, people, I did it to myself.

I'm thinking that what I need here is a Plan. This here dissertation is my Red Bull (Beagle reference; see entry for 1/14/03), and if I am not to be driven into the sea by it, I've got to abandon my metaphor and break it down into a series of doable tasks.