Thesis mode

My memory is odd. Looking back I get the impression that I've spent the last six months in general idleness, avoiding work and skiving off, and present Sara hates past Sara because of it, because when the looking back occurs present Sara is usually hustling to meet a deadline and wondering why past Sara didn't take care of it. But when I flip back through my diary it becomes clear why past Sara didn't take care of it, because past Sara generally does far more hustling of other types than present Sara remembers.

Today was the day that the first rough draft of my critical thesis was due to my supervisor. A week ago today was the day that I actually began working on it, because in the month before that I owed Henry 20,000 words, taught for FLY, presented at a conference, spent a week in the US doing research, judged a short fiction prize, had Annual Progress Review, and more or less kept up with the planning of my own conference. So the acrimony directed at past Sara was generally groundless, as very little skiving took place.

I've been writing up my research periodically as I've gone along, more as notes on what I've done than as actual readable material, and I've churned out a handful of self-contained pieces, so writing the first draft was less 'writing' than 'figuring out what part of what I already had was useable.' And if I'm bad at remembering what I've done, I'm even worse at remembering what I've already included in a document. So instead of approaching the thesis with any dignity, I took the arts-and-crafts line of attack:

Print it out, cut it up, sort like with like, put it back together, throw away the extra pieces. Just like Ikea.

I don't remember when I started doing it this way - no surprise there - but 'cut it all up and put it back together in an order that makes sense' seems to be the only way that I produce nonfiction that's in any way readable. 

It's kinda depressing to think that that's my critical output for the past three years. 

The risk, of course, is that all of the cutting and pasting and sorting out will take up so much time that the draft will be done in theory when the deadline pops up, but won't have made it back onto the computer. So far that hasn't happened, but I won't be surprised if one day I wind up hand-delivering a nine-foot sheet of taped-together paragraphs in lieu of a Word document. 

The whole was finished and sent at about ten this morning, with much fear and trembling because it's both far longer than my supervisor is expecting and far rougher than I was hoping it would be. Though, when I first sat down a week ago and looked at what I had, I hid under the desk and refused to come out because I thought I had absolutely nothing to show for the past three years, so I suppose I'm in a 100% better position than I expected to be.