Folks, I am here to report that I am in need of a mental epidural.

It has been about 50 hours of wrangling with my first chapter. It is a rough, unpolished stone; there is probably about another 25 hours of polishing this damn thing, but I can see it taking shape.

I can also report that it isn’t that bad. It’s pretty good. It will be better, but OMG. I am so tired of it. I compare it to the three times I’ve given birth, and frankly, childbirth (and I had emergency Caesarians each time) was a lot easier, thank you very much.

The chapter is hard to write because I have a LOT of information to use — a good thing. However, I’ll get chugging along on a paragraph, and realize I’m missing something, so I have to stop and look it up. Or, check my source.

The other thing that makes the first draft of the first chapter hard is the way I actually drafted it. I basically started writing — vocabu-vomiting, I suppose is what you’d call it — I got it all out on the paper. Then, I compared it to my outline, and reorganized the vomit. Gross. And yeah, some of the stuff I wrote isn’t much better looking than that.

So, I’m here to say that I’m still working at the first draft. It is getting better. I think it’s going to be pretty good, and I don’t expect to have it done in the next 24 hours — but certainly by the end of the week.

I have to teach a class tomorrow and grade papers. I’ll keep you posted on the progress.

Categories: Family Research Status

Tagged as: first draft mental epidural vocabu-vomiting

jsmith532

Professor,
Communication, Arts, and the Humanities
The University of Maryland Global Campus