Week 31: Jubilee weekend spent on editing my thesis

Maximum number of words:	80,000
Words typed so far:	50,286
Words typed this week:	0
Words lost this week:	4276
Total increase:	-4276
Days I managed to write this week:	4

Well when anyone asks me what I spent the queens Diamond Jubilee weekend doing, the answer will be hacking a chapter of my thesis into something approaching a decent form.

Which is why this is two days late and I have gone down in word count. It does not look good. I have however just sent off my chapter on Community after four days of pretty solid work on it. I sent it off not because it was finished but I realised my brain was going round in circles on the editing and there was a good chance that anything I did further would be detrimental to the chapter rather than improve it.

The words lost were probably twice what I have put in, as I have added quite a bit as well but when it comes to this sort of editing there is a very fine margin between adding words and taking them out. I suppose I could have looked at my word total on Sunday night (the time when I suspect it was highest) and counted that as words in but that still does not give a real feeling for it.

The major stuff missing at the moment is the emotional work that is there. Even as I write this I can see places where I should have put it in, but I also know I am incapable of doing so at present. My brain has got itself lost in the fog hanging around the trees of the thesis.

Any way I have created a wordle of this chapter and the right sort of words are coming out. So I guess I am getting somewhere close to where I want to be but I need to write a set of notes to myself on what I still need to do.

The rest of this week, I will probably only write three days but I hope to get on with the final appendix of the thesis. This one is about baptism as the next chapter is about worship. I am hoping that this chapter is easier to write as it is the one I have written a couple of papers on already as well. I also need to book my train ticket to Cambridge for the meeting in a couple of weeks time. However a discussion on Facebook has made me feel a lot more confident on how I handle the tradition, particularly Reformed Piety.