Thursday, October 4, 2007

Done....ish.

Yep. I've put a lid on chapter 4. Or, at least a draft of chapter four. It's not quite as "done" as I'd wanted it to be: for example, the second half of the chapter is still littered with square brackets advising me to check a reference here, or add some more analysis there, and the conclusion is, frankly, lame. But the honest-to-god truth is that I simply couldn't look at this thing anymore. I had gotten to the point where I was simply moving around the deck chairs on the Titanic, so to speak.

So anyway, even as we speak, the thing is printing out. I'm going to post this, then label a file folder "Chapter 4 Draft", and put it in my desk drawer, never to be looked at again until I've got drafts at this level of all the other chapters, too. By then, I should have some perspective.

Oh, and by the way: in this last iteration, the chapter lost some 550 words, so the word count went backwards for a while. Not bad, though: I expected this chapter to be about 13,000 words, and it ended up at 15,500 -- for better or for worse.

5 comments:

Belle said...

Wasn't there a song that went

Celebrate
Celebrate
Dance to the music!

So, Notorious, dance!

medieval woman said...

go you!!! I'm highly impressed and wish you continued awesome writing mo-jo!

Notorious Ph.D. said...

Thank you both! I've resolved to take the whole weekend off... do laundry, sleep late, restock groceries, and the like. The only "work" on the MS I plan to do this weekend is strategize which chapter I'm going to move on to next. The two I have in mind are very different, so I need to ponder this a bit. Perhaps a post on this subject tonight or tomorrow.

squadratomagico said...

Congratulations! I'm pretty impressed with your word count bar, actually. Lookin' good! Maybe you should do something REALLY crazy this weekend and go to a movie or something!

I also think setting it aside to get some perspective is a good idea. Everyone's process is different, I suppose, but I really benefit from that.

Notorious Ph.D. said...

Actually, squadro, I didn't go to a movie, but I did go on a bike/hike & dinner with a friend from work, then an impromptu dinner party with my next-door neighbor and some friends of hers. Today, I'm doing a bit of unassigned reading (see the new widget in the sidebar), and plan to while away the day in coffee shops.

Oh yeah: and laundry. I finally did laundry.