The second chapter–a megalo-chapter with probably too much conceptual
hefting–is nearly drafted. Granted, it’s a raw, rough draft, but I’m
generally happy with it, happy, more than anything, with the paces I’ve been
able to manage by writing on it each and every day (of the week). At close
to 60 pages, it will almost certainly be the longest chapter in the diss.
Sixty probably sounds like a long chapter, but it’s not so much when you
consider that it allows about 10-15 pages per concept, and it’s difficult to
imagine doing less with this conceptual groundwork than I have already. If
anything, the chapter needs airing out, expansion, and more explanation where
I’ve gone thin (including tired or lazy). I wouldn’t be surprised at all if my
committee encourages me to split it into two chapters to allow more breathing
room. Rough though it is, it’s a start. And it does, more or less
effectively, what I promised in the prospectus that it would do. That much
is reassuring.

I still have a couple of pages to go, and right now I have included just one
image, although two or three more still need to be added. Based on the
measure of 300 words to a page, I was thinking that at 15,000 words, it would be
about 50 pages, but right now it’s up around 15,700 words and 58 pages.

Chapter one is next. I think I’ve been every bit as prepared to write
this one as the second one. I have a clear sense of what I will try to
accomplish in the first chapter and how, approximately, it will move from point
to point. It should last for maybe 35-40 pages, and to keep to this, I
will have to be careful (i.e., highly controlled) in navigating a couple of the
quagmires, such as the matter of diswamplinarity. I still have to make a couple
of decisions about how to avoid sinking up to my knees in the "internal
problematic" of diswamplinarity.

And then, and then, and then. I have been trying to switch between
working the data and writing. The data still needs more work–painstaking
(i.e., Oh merciful one, what have I done to deserve this?) coding, copying and
pasting and sorting, looking up details, building XML files, and so on. It
will neither kill me nor make me stronger, but the lines and lines of
data will have to be well in hand before I can do much with chapters three
through five. I guess those three chapters are what we could call
methods chapters, but I’ve had to get used to the idea that this project
doesn’t follow the well-worn path when it comes to dissertations. I don’t
mind that it doesn’t follow the distributive formulism of intro + lit. review +
methodology + application + pedagogy or implications = Ph.D. I’m sort of
doing some lit. reviewy stuff in the second chapter, but it’s also concept
reviewy–the defining of terms that often happens in the first chapter, so I’ve
heard. And the diss doesn’t offer a topical inquiry as much as scope and promote a new methodology, so the whole thing, you might say, is loaded up with chapters on methods.

Before the end of the semester, I’d like to draft the first two chapters and
build a couple of the models for chapters three through five. For the next ten
weeks, that means wrapping up the massaging of data and getting down chapter
one. There’s a rough plan for what will follow, but I won’t bother
rehashing that right now. I’m just trying to drop a buoy in the Sea-of-Diss
so that when my head clears in a few months, I will have left a trail to help
me retrace what happened.