(Thesis draft removed — see here for full first draft)
My computer is running slow. I just closed about thirty tabs across both the Chrome windows I have open, a mere 21 remaining open. My desktop is cluttered with map mistakes, PDFs with only numbers as labels, with outdated apps like Microsoft Paint. Whenever my cursor moves over the Adobe reader shortcut, 13 (!!) forgotten documents jump into my view. Its thesis season.
This week, some things seem to be coming together. The top of my hourglass, though probably too much so, is stocked with interdisciplinary perspectives on disasters, on environmental literature, on tragedy, on literary analysis, on the novel Frankenstein. My results section is growing surely, slowly, and in many directions. There is too much to say. I really focused in on the top and middle of the hourglass this week, although the bottom of the hourglass is shaping in my head as I find yet more theoretical perspectives to bring to bear on the beast. As I’m writing, I definitely feel scattered. I will find a sentence in an article that needs to go in my background, and have to scroll up 10 pages. I’ve been finding incomplete sentences that I just stopped writing because a thought for an entirely different section of my paper occurred to me.
In order to turn in a complete draft by Tuesday, I will need to diligently work on my results section, actually writing it all out. I am almost through the first of five texts, although this first one is sort of six all together. So I have hope and determination that it will get done. I’ve been having a lot of fun writing the thesis this week, despite the physical exhaustion and pesky other responsibilities that are distracting me. I’ve finally begun inserting proper citations in the text and polishing the meta-data in my Zotero library, which both makes me feel more legitimate when writing and makes realize just how dense my topic is. And theoretical. And detailed. I think this will be a challenge for all thesis writers, but my project deals with so many different plot details and characters that span texts and worlds and time. I have to explain books and stories to people who haven’t read them! No one likes that. But my task is to make them not hate it.
I also polished my imagery: better tables, maps!!!, an actor network that I haven’t gotten to in my writing yet, but will post here.
If anyone wants to teach me how to make a table of contents in Word or how the heck to type “earthquake” efficiently (too much left hand dexterity for me), I would deeply appreciate.