Of inspirations and perhaps even something like momentum

So between the 3 blog posts from today and, more importantly, finishing a (read: another and potentially final) draft of the introduction to the dissertation that I wrote and then revised all in one afternoon I'm feeling like "The Productive Writer /Dissertator That Could". Thanks are due here especially to Naeem for his comments on the previous post that gave me that "itching-to-write" feeling. I feel like I can write more...not right now perhaps because I have also prepared 2 lectures for my classes tomorrow and I think I've earned the right to take a break. Well I would've taken one irrespective but this way there isn't any guilt involved.

But I digress. What I wanted to say was that today was the first day in a l-o-n-g while that writing/dissertating didn't feel painful to the point of questioning why I was in this to begin with. So, yay :-)! I want to say that I think this might have its own momentum - well at least potentially - but I won't go so far only because my Mondays and Wednesdays are hijacked by "professoring". Although I want to try and sneak something in - just the feeling is nice enough. Especially since I get to move on to the next chapter. Plus I think sticking to breaking up dissertating into a small manageable task and using the comments I received from a friend to edit the version of the intro I finished earlier in the afternoon even though I really wanted to take a break feels darn good right now. That one of my committee members described what I finished today as "enticing" is of course icing on the cake :-).

I think it's true what they say and what the author Madeleine L'Engle has summarized beautifully. To quote her, "Inspiration usually comes during work, rather than before it." Writing and rewriting the intro helped lend clarity to the overall argument of the dissertation - I've been visualizing my argument that way for a couple of weeks now but just hadn't really written it all out. Which means that I kept opening new files (Word and iPod Voice Memos) without completing thoughts all the way through. This time I didn't let myself stop - and I think that happened because there were other folks involved in the process as I mentioned above. So what was somewhat fuzzy suddenly became clear - precisely because I kept working at it.

So, momentum does and can work...now let's hope I can keep at it for a while longer especially since I'll be traveling Friday and Saturday. In other words, the timetable is ambitious but so am I :-). Stay tuned for updates.