Wow!

So, today, at Starbuck's (my writing place) I got to a place where I can say I am done with the first draft of my Buffy chapter. This is a big step!! I need to have the draft TO my committee soon, and my conclusion chapter written and to my committee, along with the edited versions of all the other chapters, by the end of April. Then that leaves the whole summer to revise as the committee sees fit, and then to defend the dissertation before my September deadline.

So in having the Buffy chapter to a place that I can call "the end of the first draft" I ought to be about a week away from sending that chapter to the committee!! And then that means all I have left to completely compose is my conclusion chapter. And that means that the April deadline is certainly do-able, given that I have managed to get a lot of work done on this Buffy chapter in a couple of weeks, and the conclusion chapter is MOSTLY just me saying "Here's what I said in the other chapters." (There will be some new stuff on some of the other texts I initially thought I'd do a whole separate chapter on... but not a lot).

This is very exciting. I have gone through a lot of places with my dissertation, from gleeful "Hey this'll be easy" (back in the beginning days, long long ago.) to "I'm never going to get this done" and "I feel like quitting; I'll just teach high school with my Master's degree". So now I am at a place where it is again starting to feel do-able.

When my best friend finally gets her PhD this May, and I go to her graduation, and her family & our friends ask me "So how much longer for you?" (as they are sure to ask; they will not be able to contain themselves) I can say, and mean, I will be done this fall.

Wow. Now to look at the draft which just finished printing on my printer there, which is waiting, all warm and papery, on the top of the printer. It still needs lots of work, don't get me wrong. But it's finally a full draft. That's getting somewhere.

I'm all a-gog.

Oh, and in other news, I cut my hair again yesterday. Short. BOY short. Like, she had to clean up the back of my neck with a razor short. :) Like Alyssa Milano in Charmed a couple of seasons ago short. Sean especially kept pulling my hair, and he would catch the tender hair at the nape of my neck and OUCH! And I was tired of having a messy hairdo, pulled up into a ponytail. Now it's easy to style-- wash it, gel it, and "I'm out the do". I'll post pix soonish, maybe. :) It's a little butch, but I'm content with it for now. I'll grow it long again when I'm done with my dissertation and the babies are a little older. Fun! :)