Bring on the revisions.
I have finished writing my thesis! That deserves an exclamation point. I am done. done. done. That is, I am done with the composing from scratch.
I now have to revise, but I have been revising all along, so this should not be so bad. So where am I exactly?
I have finished writing all of the chapters that will be appearing in my thesis. They are all there, structured in the way I want them structured and some of them are very very polished. The others, are very polished, but still need some work to reach the very, very polished status.
I should be able to defend my thesis the week of May 21.
At the moment, I have sent out the first three chapters to my two additional committee members. I received comments back from one of those two.
The remaining chapters have all been edited by my committee chair. I need to revise those, and send those out to my other two committee members. When I get comments back from them, I will revise my thesis to create a “defense version,” which is what I will defend later this month. Then after the defense, everyone signs off and I pay to have it bound, and it sits on the shelves of the Park Library forever and ever as a nicely bound red BOOK.
What have I learned?
1. I learned how to mine for good stuff from the bits and pieces of writing prompts I have written in the past.
2. I have learned that my rough draft material tends to have major issues with conflicting verb tenses.
3. I have learned that I really truly can write something longer than a newspaper article. (When I first signed up for grad school, they wanted a copy of something I had written that was longer than 8 pages in lenght, and I did not have one single solitary thing. Now I have lots of somethings over 8 pages in length. Hoozah!)
4. I learned that while I was swamped with work, my children grew several inches, and when I finally look up from my laptop I noticed that their clothing had all shrunk, especially the boy child who is not yet concerned that he looks like an orphan covered with dirt wearing clothes two sizes too small. Since I have noticed, my most frequent comment to him (besides I love you) is “Are you wearing clean underwear?”
5. I learned that when I compose from a writing prompt I am more likely to be guilty of info dump. Info dump is not good.
6. I learned I was most guilty of writing info dump when I was trying to explain my complicated family structure — that I’m 11 years younger than the second youngest, while the other four are stairsteps, etc.
But finally I figured it out and eliminated the info dump.
7. I learned I was not very nice to my mother when I was a teenager, and she loved me anyway.
8. I learned I can WRITE.
9. I learned that I learned things about me by the very act of writing.
10. I learned how nice it is to finally be able to see THE END. And that feeling lasts for about 5 seconds before you realize now that the degree is within your grasp that now the hard work really begins — getting a job.
