Starting the final straight to submission

Well after the excitement of getting permission to submit this weekend was time to settle down and start the process. It is one thing to have permission it is quite another to get the work done. I have had one day off (as after the stress of teaching and a supervision I worked out that the chance my brain would do anything productive on Friday was zilch and my guess was about right).

I have had one productive day which was Saturday when I managed to get the chapter of tradition worked around as my supervisor had suggested and back to him to check that it was ok. For those who are proof reading please do not worry I am not going to expect you to proof read these last set of changes. The interesting thing is it involved the removal of a piece. I have mixed feelings about this, at this stage I accept I needed to remove it. The other option really would have been to expand it considerably as the actual problem is I need to give a lot more information for it to work. However, I am right up against my word limit so doing that was not really an option. Actually I cut it out then saved it in another file so when I go from writing a PhD to writing a book (I hope) I can use it as a basis of the expansion that I will need to do. I have rather a large chapter on  methodology and probably could turn it into a couple of papers but it will not be part of a book.

The final day has been poor and I am going to have to catch it up during the week. I need to write a short piece about a specific researcher somewhere  in my thesis. It needs to be there because I use him a significant amount and I have not put what I am using in context. That means a paragraph or so maybe 500 words. Sounds easy with a thesis 80,000 words but it isn't. The thing is that the piece relies on a specific book. My supervisor insisted I had the book, checked today and it was as I thought, no sign of the book. What is more there is a good reason for that. The book is out of print and I think when I have looked in the past pretty expensive to buy secondhand. Of course it is not on Kindle and Google books has managed to chop all the bits I need to read out. So I have bought it. Actually I have bought it twice and I hope one copy arrives. I have also been distracted looking at stuff on the sociology of Prayer for a friend. (Hint: the stuff is very limited.) Actually I have written most of what I want to say and I think that it will be the matter of an hour or so next weekend if I manage to get some reading done in the week.

The other thing for this week is to book time off so I can actually go through the process of submitting it without glitches. That will be several days at the start of April. So a busy thesis week ahead but no excursions out of Sheffield.

Well a couple of fairly productive weeks

Daffodils at a local park

I am just realising that I did not manage to write anything last week even though I did quite a bit of work. I think some of that was due to the fact that I had a very full weekend and when I finally finished the extended weekend's work on thesis I was immediately going out to elders (I took the photo was taken walking to elders).

Firstly I got feed back on the chapter on belonging, I think my supervisor is now largely happy with it just wanting minor corrections so that gives me tradition, worship and belonging as in second draft. Last weekend I sent off the redraft of flows. It is frustrating in some ways. On one level it works as a chapter but the thread that would make it shine is not there yet.  I want it to shine and I know it is something quite simple but I am not sure what. Anyway I got it off to my supervisor so that is three officially in second draft and a fourth possibly.

I say that with last weekend not just being Easter weekend but also my ministers last weekend with us. She is inducted to a church in Southampton next weekend. I found that Friday and Saturday were not good writing days especially as I was worrying about being table elder on the Sunday and getting things right for the service. I was also off colour not quite sure now what with; at the time I thought I was skirting a migraine but it also sounds very much like a bug that is going around. However my brain cleared on Tuesday and I got things sorted and off to my supervisor.

So this weekend I have been working at getting another chapter up to scratch. The one this time is the one on location and what I am trying is even though this is descriptive chapter to see if I can integrated with the observational data and see what I actually come up with. It takes a bit of doing because the use I have done of the theory is pretty general. That and I need to cut this by a third for the thesis length.  It may work, it may not. The idea at the present is to work from locating, through the use of space to the experience of worship. We shall see.