Final InaDWriMo

I'm certainly not the winner of the InaDWriMo challenge, but it was good for me nonetheless. I had set aside all of November for writing with the ultimate goal of a complete first draft of a new manuscript. I did produce a draft but it is still very rough. My word meter reports my progress at ~50%. Since I only have one other completed (but not submitted) manuscript, I had a hard time estimating a word goal. I think 8000 was too much. In fact I'd say my word count won't change much but that 50% finished is pretty accurate.

November wasn't a total failure though. I heavily revised a paper I'm working on with Awesome Technician (the ball is currently in her court) and I made lots of progress on the Paper That Will Never Get Submitted. It was that diminishing returns stage of progress though, so it didn't necessarily feel like a lot for the amount of time I spent on it. Anyway, Academic Advisor says he has nothing more to contribute so now I'm waiting for Research Advisor to read it. still.

I had intended to go back to lab work in December but I'd like to push ahead with the paper as well. My goals for the year included finishing the lab work for Chapter 3 and I might be able to do that with some concerted effort. I think I'm going to work on the paper for a few hours each morning and then shift to the lab for the bulk of the day.

InaDWriMo update and stuff

It has been ages since I last posted. We had a visitor from Far Off Land staying with us last week, which kept us pretty busy. Then this weekend I put off posting because I felt bad about my InaDWriMo progress. I thought I'd write on Saturday, so I decided to wait until Saturday night to post. Then I didn't even open my document on Saturday, so I promised myself I'd work on it on Sunday. You can guess how that went. No writing progress. No posting.

I think this is the exact behavior that frequently inhibits many of us. And I suspect it's the reason a certain person has still not read my paper.

Anyway, the week before last I sent a strongly worded email to my advisors to urge them to comment on my paper (not my InaDWriMo project, but the paper I've been working on all year). So last week Academic Advisor found some time for it. We spent Wednesday afternoon sending pieces of the draft back and forth, picking away at his last criticisms. I continued with those on Thursday and then sent a corrected version with comments in the margins on Thursday night. Friday we met again to discuss these last concerns. Now I have just a few last tweaks before I send it around again. Academic Advisor thinks it's ready to submit, pending one final read-through after a few days. Now it's up to Research Advisor to put it her two cents. Or suggest a dramatic overhaul that will take at least 3 weeks.

I worked on my InaDWriMo project a little bit too. I felt like I wasn't getting anywhere until today, actually. I had bits and pieces of disjointed thoughts scattered through a rough, bullet-point outline. Today I fleshed it out a little and joined the pieces together so that it now sort of resembles a draft. A very rough draft, but a draft nonetheless. Now comes the process of working through the literature I've compiled to find all the best references. There will be lots of revision to the text as that happens.

We're having friends over tomorrow, then going to my home town for Thanksgiving, then on Sunday EGM leaves for a 6-week field trip. Time is flying! I hope the time he's away goes just as fast.

InaDWriMo update

I have actually made some progress this week! Being accountable to InaDWriMo has helped me get over it and start chipping away at this writing project that seems a little daunting. I spent most of the week working up data. I gave a presentation on this study at a meeting in August, but at that time I had processed the data very quickly and knew there were some things I needed to work out. It's interesting how time can change things, though, because a few issues that I thought were real dilemmas in August strike me as obvious decisions now. I have now decided to handle the data analysis one way, however, I think that could change later when I discuss it with my advisors.

Anyway, by deciding to just deal with the data instead of reworking it over and over, I was able to make some progress. Most of the figures are made. I still need to decide about some tables, but I think what I need will become clear as I finalize the results section. So far I have written out sentences systematically describing most of the results. I need to complete that section and edit it into something readable.

My word meter is at 30% which I think is a little misleading. I've been jotting down paragraphs here and there to record ideas and that's starting to turn into an outline. I think most of that text will be entirely rewritten though.

My goals for next week are to finish the results section including the figures and tables, come up with an outline, and draft a few key paragraphs that I'm positive I will need. I have already gathered the literature I need for each of these paragraphs so it shouldn't be all that hard to write them.

In other writing news, I had to lay down the law in an email to my advisors, one of whom has still not read the paper I've been talking about here all year. The other one promised comments on my latest draft by Monday and scheduled a meeting for Tuesday to discuss it. Great! Now if I could just get the other to do the same, I'd be in business.

Progress Update #1

Okay, so I know I sorta begged Dr Brazen Hussy for InaDWriMo and now it's already November 9 and I haven't even put a word counter up. Shame on me. I promise I'll get on it. For now, here is a summary of my goals.

I'd like to accomplish two writing tasks this month: 1) a very short paper I'm co-writing with Awesome Technician and 2) the first draft of the manuscript that will be Chapter 3 of my dissertation. AT gave me a very, very rough draft of the manuscript a few weeks ago and I think it will end up much shorter than the original so, although both manuscripts are InaDWriMo goals, I think I will base my word count goal only on the Chapter 3 paper. Let's say 5000 words. I already have a rough draft of the methods section, so I'm going to start my count with that even though it's cheating a little since I wrote it before Nov 1.

My progress this past week was pretty slow. I spent two days in the field helping with other lab projects and Tuesday was pretty much shot with the election hoo-ha. I did work on the short paper the other two days. I pretty much overhauled AT's draft -- reorganizing it, clarifying the logic, and working out some of the arguments. I had been working on a it before Nov 1, but I got it far enough to send it back to AT on Friday. It still needs lots of work, but I'm hopeful that we'll have a finished draft by the end of the month. The co-writing process has been pretty interesting so far, so I think I will write a separate post about that soon.

I did make some small progress toward the Chapter 3 paper as well. I had one last little bit of data to collect and now that's done! It feels fantastic to have every last number in the spreadsheet (I think). I'm really hoping to have a complete draft of this thing by Dec 1, but there is a lot of data crunching and interpretation that need to be done, so I think it will be slow going.

In other news, today is my 1 year blogoversary. I intended to write a post about how much my blog habits have changed since I switched from being a reader/commenter only to writing a blog as well. Perhaps tomorrow.

UPDATE: Um, so I just did a word count for the Chapter 3 paper and it's already more than 1000 words. I think I will up my goal to 8000. kthnxbai.