vswpaper's Diaryland Diary

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Looking at a milestone, not the finish

A little downhearted today, on two counts. First is the realization that while I may finish the main draft today, I'll still have a little cleanup work to do on it to really complete it. And then, that's not the end of my work--it can't go off to Prof. Abel today. I've got to clean it up for draft two to go out to my friends, which includes checking all the quotes, and probably some rhetorical fixes, and then a big item discussed momentarily. What this means is, after tonight I won't be able to turn my attention to all the things on my After list. I'll have to continue working this week and juggle such things as preparing for our porch rebuild to start Thursday, and a heavier paid workload--and then I'll be able to ship the piece off I hope before the weekend so I can get to some some other things for a little while at least.

The big item is reworking the thesis. As I was closing in on what my real point is (the idea of Bernard assuming female attributes) it really hit me how that's probably less than 25 percent of the paper, and maybe a lot less. Which hooks into my anxiety about the thesis statement. I just think it's no good if demonstrating the thesis, as opposed to laying the groundwork for the demonstration, is less than a quarter of the paper. I believe the solution is to make the thesis more general, so it embraces the ideas of examining male and female and coming to androgyny, and Bernard is merely the final stage of that bigger idea. That also clears the way to big statement about the area of the paper along the lines of "Androgyny was a big deal to Virginia Woolf." I want to run that way of recsting things by my best-writer friend, and if I get the nod as I expect to, then I'll just do my best at it for draft two and see what both my friends think.

Today, I'm trying to whip myself up to finish the bulk of the draft, to disregard the thesis problem since it won't change the structure of the paper, and write the text through to the end. With that in hand, I'll go for my first After treat, which is borrowing Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince from the library to reread. It's on hold and I have until Friday, but my idea is that once I've got the draft, I can allow my leasure reading (evenings and on the bus mainly) to be something besides Woolf-related stuff (for example, I was rereading the Bell biography from where she starts on Jacob's Room, and reading Prof. Abel's book). On the other hand, the book group I haven't been to for these six months is meeting week after next, so I could choose that book, and then get the additional reward of some socializing. But getting through a whole new book might actually interfere with my work. Maybe I'll make up my mind tomorrow, assuming success in today's task.

1:03 p.m. - 2007-02-25

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