Day 16: Slowly but surely...

Braved the snow and went to a very nice lunch. Then I played in the snow for a while, then now I'm back to get some work done. Just taking a quick break to update this journal, since I didn't do it yesterday.

I have been working my ass off, and getting a lot of work done. Well, a lot of organizational work done, anyhow. But it's making me feel tons better, and a lot more confident about finishing up my dissertation. It's actually making it a lot more real than before.

Yesterday I downloaded all the templates that I needed for the manuscript preparation, and I put everything that I had until now in the template. What happened is that I had to add a chapter, and now I'm up to 104 pages of draft. It's definitely a SFD, but it's done! So, now I'm trying to identify all the stuff that I still have to do.

I really have to give myself credit for being so aware of how I do things. Since I started my studies, I decided on what I wanted to do, and almost all the papers I did for courses related to that. So that now come time to compose the dissertation, I can just plug stuff in where they belong, and be assured that I did all the necessary background reading that I needed to do. Anything new can just be plugged in where it needs to go. But, it's important to have the structure in before I do anything else.

Last night I also stayed up until after midnight working on my personal website, and I actually now have it to where I like it, so that I could start adding stuff to it without constantly be worried about how it looks. I am about 90% satisfied with it. It's professional, clean, and straight to the point.

And now I'm going to through the dissertation, moving things around, and adding random things here and there just to have a bulk. Because it's so huge, I need to have a way for me to get the view of the big forest before I start planting more individual trees.

And, after all is said and done, I have to pat myself on the back a little bit for being at this point. I could be fighting and whining, but no, I actually had the foresight to design my entre career in a way to lead up to this point. So that I don't have to worry about writing things from absolute scratch. Very few people do that, and I need to give myself a bit of credit. This is easy, doable, and it will be done. I just have to repeat that to myself, and not think about what I don't have control over, like my committee's reaction.

I'm going to hand in a draft to my DA, and then she can slash and burn as she wants. In the meantime, I can only control what I do, and that's about it.

Right. Time to keep going!