vswpaper's Diaryland Diary

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This is the hard part

Made the mistake of looking at my archive and noting the date of my first entry, last May. Sigh. I had a terrible thought today, which is that my paper would have been an interesting paper to write 20 years ago, when I should have done it, but now popular culture has a whole set of tropes about men getting in touch with their feminine side, which kind of takes the edge off. These kinds of thoughts do me no good, of course, and I need to get back to staring at the screen until drops of blood form on my forehead, as one of my bosses used to say about writing.

I'm now working from a crude thesis, which I'll put in my next entry (router issues and working on two computers keep me from doing it in this one), together with an outline that contains numerical references to my quote spreadsheet. It's tough sledding, or perhaps I should say it's tough dragging the sled up a rocky, snowless, muddy slope.

Tonight I'm planning to write Professor Abel to get the formatting rules for the piece. I'm sure I'll end up tallying my words obsessively once I know how many I need and how the quotes are to work, but that's probably unavoidable, and now that we're in the new year, I want some contact with the professor to bolster my sense of getting toward the finish.

6:37 p.m. - 2007-01-23

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