My Progress and Questions for Safiak

So, I had started feeling a bit panicked about my lack of progress. Mostly, I was nervous about how distant I was feeling from my topic, and I was starting to worry that I'd have a hard time starting the engines again or that I would have lost a lot of ground (sorry for the mixed metaphors).

But yesterday, I spent a couple of hours writing and editing, and I wasn't quite as rusty as I thought. I think a lot of my ideas and some of my research is still in my brain. Yes, I will have to go back over sources and re-read, but I've only fallen one of two steps back. This experience does make me realize that I need to do more note-taking, free-writing after each article/chapter that I read. I did that for the first piece I wrote last June, and it really helped. This fall, I was reading a lot of books, and I think I was overwhelmed by all of the info, so I didn't take many notes. Well, to clarify, I wrote down a lot of quotations, but I didn't write much about my own reactions to the texts and quotations. I need to get back to doing that since those notes can really turn into valuable text.

But so yesterday I wrote about 1000 words and was very happy. They aren't all good words, and they are a bit quote heavy, but it's progress.

So, SafiaK, how are things going with all of your deadlines? How is the conference stuff shaping up? What's the title of your paper?