Why I Might Never Finish My Dissertation

To begin, I'm going to finish my dissertation. I'm like 75% finished now. I'm one chapter away from having a complete draft (minus the conclusion, but that won't be written until all the other chapters are edited). I can see the light at the end of the tunnel, and it doesn't look like a train.

So here's the thing. I'm having a hard time dealing with this flurry of activity followed by a crash. The problem is that if I can't finish the chapter in a flurry, then I'm in trouble. That's what's happening now with this Poe chapter. I've got a full 25 pages, which I got pretty much all last week, but I'm not finished with the chapter yet. I haven't even really talked about The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym at all (and I guess that sentence only makes sense if you've both read Pym and know the gist of what I'm doing). But the way the chapter has shaped up so far, I think I need to reorganize almost everything I've written so far in order to best incorporate Pym into the discussion because it's such a problematic text. I can't really talk about Pym straight through because so much of it doesn't really deal with the coast. But there's definitely material there for me, so I have to really craft how I present it.

Anyway, today I was in my office working and was motivated to get some work done, and thought I had some good ideas. So I stopped thinking and turned to my computer to write. And automatically checked my email. Then I checked the news. Then I looked at Facebook. By the time I got around to my chapter, I had lost all motivation. So effing frustrating.

The worst part is that this seems like a willpower question. It's easy to say, "just don't do that distracting stuff." But at this point, that's a hard thing to do. Argh. It doesn't help that this was at like 1:30, and I'm definitely a morning person. And in all fairness, this morning I did get the overview of how the coast is a good location for American Gothic, so that was good. But by lunchtime, I was done.

But see, now I'm looking forward to getting to work tomorrow morning. So here's to the morning and the sweet, sweet coffee that comes with it.