grammargirl | So close and yet so far

I'm starting to get to the more unpleasant part of the thesis-writing process: the nitpicky cleanup and editing type stuff. The thing is, as long as I was writing, watching my page count steadily (if slowly) multiply, I really felt like I was making a lot of progress. Now I have to go through and attempt to impose some sort of structure on the hideously disorganized first chapter I wrote before I had a clue and have barely looked at since December, and it's driving me batshit. I still have to work in everyone's comments on my drafts, fix wonky quotation marks and footnotes, reword sentences so awkward I can't believe they made it through endless stages of workshopping unscathed. I have to write my conclusion and abstract tomorrow, and I'm almost looking forward to it just so I can be making some visible progress. I've spent hours tonight going through people's comments, scribbling in corrections of my own, writing outline after outline in an effort to find some kind of logical order for my poor mishmash of a first chapter. I never even got around to opening the Word file on my computer. So many hours of work tonight, and I feel like I've accomplished exactly nothing concrete. Blech.

(Mom's taking me out to dinner at Gratzi on the 13th and I'm making her buy me groceries, Great Big Sea concert is on the 25th, Ben Folds is April 3rd and we're 38 days away from Penguicon if we count today as Monday, which it is technically. I can do this. I can do this. I can do this.)