January Report

Here's January--the stars represent time spent working on revising chapter 2 to give to my second reader (who is harder to please than my advisor). The good news is that he liked it! He said to start on chapter 3 immediately, do not revise or tinker any further at this point, do not pass go, do not collect $200. That works for me and my schedule. On to February—to create, I hope, another 40-page document starting from scratch.

As you can see from the star distribution, I've gotten good at going to the library to work on the weekends. There are just some days in mid-week I can't get quite around to working on the diss. Things at the office have been busy, and then I get tired and all I want to do is go home and play Rock Band.

October Report

Here's what October looked like, dissertation-output-wise. Notice the big lull after my last meeting with my adviser. My next meeting with her is right before Thanksgiving. I hope to have a draft of my George Eliot chapter done by then!

Finishing the chapter will make it harder to crank out 300 words a day—I'll need to refine, and even edit out, verbiage. So I won't get as many of those 300-word gold stars—probably more of the silver, "I'm here in my office futzing around on the chapter," stars.

Tuesdays and Wednesdays are the hardest days for getting anything done because I have to put in full days of work at the office. Then on Wednesdays I like to go to yoga or pilates at night. If I'm not careful, that break from the diss can spread into Thursday and the weekend. Vigilance!

September Report

Here is my dissertation productivity for September. The gold stars show when I met the 300-word mark; the silver stars are when I was in my study carrel but reading rather than writing (I had to slog through George Eliot's 500-page Felix Holt to complete the section of the chapter I met with my advisor about yesterday.) If you count the gold stars, I wrote 3,600 words last month, or about 12 pages. Not exactly burning through the dissertation. But I'll take any progress over no progress.

Yesterday my advisor said that giving her new work to read every three weeks meant I was making good time. She said, "Sometimes I can't get people to come see me for eight months."

How on earth did George Eliot write Felix Holt in fourteen months? That's 186,046 words! Hmm, wait a minute, that's only 443 words a day...but every single day.

Gold Star

I went out and bought myself a $1.89 pack of gold (and red and green, etc) stars, and am putting one on the calendar for every day I write 300 words. Starting today. First gold star!

I'm at the library now, where I just cranked out that 300 words between a takeout sushi dinner and a lecture I'm going to attend at 8:30. I also made a plan for upcoming writing sessions: tomorrow, Sunday, and Monday.

Last week I went to see my advisor for the first time since the beginning of the summer, and it was a very good thing to do. I gave her the eight measly pages I had thrown together out of all the disconnected fragments of the summer, and she gave me many practical suggestions on where to go from there. She also wants to see me every three weeks this semester, with a new 10-15 pages to give her each time. Our next appointment is for September 10.

I've been writing about the epigraphs in Middlemarch. That's going to be a section of my George Eliot chapter. If you asked me today what my dissertation is about, I'd say it's about the use of poetry in novels. Of course, what my dissertation is about is remarkably unstable. I wonder if I'll know what it's about even after it's done?

Big vs. Small Picture

I've been feeling paralyzed trying to organize my thoughts on George Eliot, because I keep thinking, "How will this fit into the whole dissertation?" and then I veer off into bland and general conjectures. I have to remember that it doesn't have to fit into the dissertation because there is no dissertation yet. The direction the dissertation takes will have to do with what I learn by writing this chapter. So I've plunged in.

Quote of the day from Middlemarch:

"I think any hardship is better than pretending to do what one is paid for, and never really doing it. Everything here I can do as well as any one else could; perhaps better than some."

(Said by Mary Garth, chapter 14, when asked why she left off being a teacher and took up employment as the companion to a grumpy old invalid.)

George Eliot

I've started working on Chapter 2, the George Eliot chapter. I have much of Chapter 1—the Christina Rossetti chapter—done already since it was the paper I submitted as part of comps, and the committee suggested I move on to another chapter before coming back to it.

Working on George Eliot makes me very happy. I have no freakin' idea what I'm going to say about her epigraphs (the topic I made up to have something to put in my prospectus), but the research is fun. Some friends of ours are having a baby shower for some other friends who are having a girl, and it's a book shower—everyone is supposed to bring a book as a present. Of course I knew instantly that I would be bringing Middlemarch. I prescribe that novel to all young women, and to everyone else as well. I first read it in my late twenties, but I wish I had read it earlier, because certain themes—like the academic crush—would have been pertinent.

On every page you'll find a sentence with a complication, a witty or surprising turn. And then there are her warmth and sympathy that shine through quotes like this one. She never writes anyone off, which makes one not write oneself off.