Thursday 13 November 2014

A minor miscalculation

Way back in June, I figured that it was probably a good time to concentrate on trying to finish drafting the novel half of my thesis, since novels are, by definition, evil, and this one has a deadline attached to it. And since I couldn't completely drop the critical part and then expect to pick it up again later in the year without suffering setbacks, I figured that the easiest thing would be to work slowly on the chapter that focused on the textbook series that had the most assorted dreck already written about it. Theoretically, that should have meant that most of my work had been done by other people; at the start it looked like a matter of comparing four versions of one book in light of one or two secondary sources. I thought it would be a straightforward task, something to keep my brain in condition.

Oh how wrong I was.

Four months down the line, this is what Dave's dining room table looks like:

There's a box of Lemsip capsules in there somewhere, because of course I've been sick for the last six weeks. 
As it turns out, there were five versions of my primary text, but because of the way that the copyright page is formatted, the 1980 version was impossible to find. It was listed for sale all over the internet, but every time I bought a copy and waited the necessary month or so for it to be shipped from the states, it turned out to be the 1983 or 1986 edition. And as it also happened, the one or two important secondary sources referenced other, equally important secondary sources, which led to a wild secondary source hunt, which eventually led to me adding six other primary source texts to the chapter for the sake of due diligence, because sometimes it's just easier and more sensible to engage with the important sources than to explain why you didn't bother and get called out on it the moment someone with letters after their name looks at what you've written.

So both of my supervisors probably think that I've dropped off the face of the planet, because I haven't had anything worth showing either of them since I started working on this chapter - it hasn't left much time or brain for fiction revision, and the one downside of drafting longhand is that I need a bit of a head start to have even a rough draft to show anyone.

On the plus side, none of the other critical chapters have so many sources, so if I ever finish this one then the beast's back should be well and truly broken. And the novel has hit ~65,000 poorly organized words. And the next critical chapter will be on a classics textbook of which there are only two relevant editions and almost no secondary sources.

Famous last words.