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.

Week 8 : While on strike and preparing for conference

Maximum number of words: 80,000
Words typed so far: 17,929
Words typed this week: 2,243
Words lost this week: 257
Total increase: 1986
Days I managed to write this week: 4

Progress still steady, missed the two thousand words this week by fourteen! There is actually good reason for that, there were also eighteen different items referenced in those words and each reference has to be chased down and checked. Basically I had at least another fourteen words I could have added but I was running out of time. Fewer words lost this week but I still ended up removing some as they did not fit where they were.

I was running out of time as tomorrow I go to the Society for the Study of Theology Postgraduate conference in Edinburgh and I am giving a talk on that. No the talk is written and I did the slides yesterday but there are other things like tidying the flat, doing a bit of shopping (so I have something to eat when I get in) and packing that need doing and can not be put off until tomorrow as i am travelling.

The conference should be interesting, there are enough papers close enough for me to find stuff that interests me. Unfortunately one seminar I would on has a head on clash with me presenting a paper. I would have been struggling to choose if which to go to if it hadn't.

The strike was interesting, it compacted my working week into three days and thereby gave me officially an extra day for thesis. In actual fact it did not work like that and I ended up tired out on the day and slept about half of it but at least I got some reading done.

I am also beginning to struggle with how bitty the thesis writing is and loose track of all my drafts and I have not started the really serious part of actually writing the data chapters! I am still on the methodology but should soon finish that.