Saturday, August 4, 2007

Finished! (And a Sense of Unease)

About half an hour ago, I finished the revisions on the article MS. Oh, sure -- I still need to print the thing out in a couple of days, doing the obligatory read-through to weed out the inevitable errors and infelicitous phrases, but I went through the reviewers' suggestions, point-by-point, and it seems that I've been able to address almost all of them.

Whenever I "finish" a writing project, I usually feel one of two ways. Sometimes (infrequently) I think "This is brilliant! People are going to read this, and think I'm pretty smart!" More frequently, however, I'm left with a sense of how it's not as good as I want it to be, but I don't know how to get it there, and wonder if maybe I'm the dumbest Ph.D. out there. My fraud complex kicks into high gear, and I'm sure that this will be the point where everyone finally sees that I'm hopeless.

In all probability, the truth lies somewhere in between. And probably, what I've produced is good enough. I'm not sure if my inability to be content with that is a good thing or not.

1 comment:

Belle said...

Ah yes. The niggles never leave us, do they? I'm sure it's fine. Breathe. Deeply.