Doctor Grandma

Every time I go back to my dissertation and start looking through it, two things happen:

1. I get excited all over again about the stories of the people I interviewed, and

2. I feel utterly overcome with exhaustion all over again.

Today I found some consent forms I had lost for a long time. I knew they were somewhere. But the possibility existed that they had been lost in a move. No, I saved everything. Found them in one of the many notebooks of papers and forms and articles sitting around from doing the dissertation. I am putting the articles I saved into notebooks, alphabetical by author. Papers exist that I never used, all over the place. Poetry people gave me, other various things.

Looking at the other books in the series a publisher wants to put mine in, they are somewhere just about 200pp. Each of their 8-9 chapters is 20 pages or so. I wrote a 400p. dissertation. I have NO idea how I am going to condense it to HALF. This is so hard, it really is such a terribly hard job.

Please God, help me get their stories out. Guide my pen, guide my clicking so I can cut out what is needed. I am afraid to take out things that should be left in. Have to remind myself, it is all still there, in the dissertation.

I think it is healthier to think of this job as an ongoing process. The important thing is to work at it systematically, every day. I didn’t write it in a day. It will not be revised in a day. My focus now is publishing. Just keep churning things out, doing the work, and hopefully, if God so wills, it will happen. I swear, if and when I get an actual publication, in print, I will throw a dang party.

This entry was posted on May 14, 2010 at 2:57 pm and is filed under writing my book. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.