Four down, and 2.6….
Tonight I think I finished my fourth chapter (which will actually be the sixth chapter of the final thing, thanks to the screwy way I wound up working on things)…the ending isn’t as tight as I’d like, but I’ll need to return to it after writinig the two chapters that precede it, since it relies on some arguments I’ll be making in those as-yet-unwritten chapters.
So, I’ve got two chapters left, one on the social culture of video stores (all about video store clerks and people hanging out while talking movies) and one on remediating films as texts from celluloid onto video (basically the chapter about letterboxing and colorization). These are the fun ones, and the ones I’ve been most looking forward to writing (hence me saving them for last, when I’m more than a bit burned out by this whole “writing” thing).
After that, it’s just a matter of writing an intro (basically cutting and pasting out of dissertation proposals and a talk I gave at the Media Ecology Association a few years ago) and a conclusion (about the idea of not being able to program one’s VCR, from a talk I gave even longer ago at SHOT).
My goal, pie-in-the-sky as it may be, is to have a full draft ready by mid-March. That is, of course, assuming no illness, no derailment, a constant level of motivation, and the continuation of this godawful draining schedule I’ve been on for the past week. Of course, I’m also going to be taking days off at a time, heading down to NYC without a single word of dissertation material, so I should be able to rejuvenate myself in fits and spurts.
Of course, if something terrible happens, like say I actually get an interview for one of those jobs I applied for, then I’d have to get a job talk ready, and either this whole schedule goes out the window or my head physically pops off of my shoulders. [irony] Hopefully, I won’t have to worry about anything awful like that. [/irony]