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I have ants. it's only a few right now, but it's the time of year and the sort of summer when they're likely to multiply rapidly.

The question is - is it time to bring out the mirror yet?

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If books I've ordered actually arrive (hah!), then I think I am nearly finished with secondary sources for this doctorate. I have maybe 20 books left to read and a couple to re-check and only about 1200 pages of stuff on the computer and I just relocated an article that was unaccountably missing (it was unaccountably missing because of a typo that had me searching for entirely the wrong thing, so really, it was accountably missing).

There's a solid satisfaction in having a pile of books and a computer file and knowing that's all I need to read for one chapter, and in having two decreasing piles (they would be decreased more except for the strange absence of two books I ordered last month) and of having reached the stage (finally!) where articles and books on the subject cease to appear at a moment's notice.

Eighteen months ago I longed for proliferation of articles and books - but that was the right place for then - now I need to diminish everything and turn it into good thinking and better writing. That's the source of satisfaction: being able to see that I can complete this particularly messy task within a respectable time frame.

What's less solid is wrestling my ideas into submission. I want to say everything all at once. This is why I'm a better novelist than scholar: I can tell stories more easily than I can explain my ideas.

Subduing my thoughts is going to be the hard bit of the next few weeks. My thoughts want to blossom everywhere - they don't want to be staked and tied and to grow in a manner that others can understand. The handy thing about this being a second doctorate is that I know I'm just being recalcitrant. My next task is to sit down and look at each and every sentence and decide if it adds to what that chapter is saying. After that I read the paragraphs and then I read the chapter as a whole. Then I re-read the whole thing and streamline it and add more examples where more examples demand to be added. If it doesn't make sense in terms of the subject matter and in terms of the whole, then it may be erudite, but it's garbage. One day I'll write a novel with a character that produces nothing but beautifully erudite garbage. Today is not that day, and I am never a character in any of my novels (though I can pretend to be, when occasion demands).

This is work. I know. I'm aware that I also said I would take today off. I'm taking tonight off, though, and tomorrow afternoon, and all on Monday afternoon and evening and most of Tuesday. If I can finish the first stages of this rewrite by those times out, then afterwards I can take a step back and polish off some of the stray secondary material and see if there are ways of making it work even better. Then I can (after real time out) do another rewrite in all those stages. And then I can hand it over to my supervisor for dissection.

Novels are easier for me.

I had two paragraphs that explained why, eloquently, but LJ lost them and I need a break from my computer so I'm not going to rewrite them! Imagine this post as lacking an ending, a summation, a rounding out. And imagine me as lacking coffee. Both are quite true!