I’m a little all over the map today. Got some strong work done this afternoon, and I think the early bits of contextualization are coming together somewhat coherently. I wrote some new material in those early sections, primarily about the postwar desire for children as a bulwark against the terrors of the atomic age and some stuff about the ambiguity of the postwar figuring of the atomic bomb as explicitly female (it’s weird, believe me). So, that felt good.

This evening…well, I’ve cannibalized a lot from an earlier draft, which isn’t a bad thing, but it rather makes me feel like I’m cheating when I tell people I’ve written 2,000 words today. But still, it’s not entirely cheating if you also do some revision on those bits that you’re copying and pasting from that earlier draft, right?

I feel like the three close readings that I offer are coming together. It would probably help if I wasn’t so scattershot in my composition process, bouncing from one section to another with basically no rhyme or reason, but that’s basically my writing process, as weird as that sounds. It sometimes does a number on my productivity, but I think at this point I’ve actually managed to harness it into a force for productivity.

I’m going to take the weekend off, as is my usual practice. I’ll probably still be thinking over the project the whole time, mulling over ideas, trying to think if there is a better, more concise, more accurate way of representing the chaos of jumbled ideas in my head on the actual page. That’s always the hardest part for me. I know that I’m onto something important and that I have a contribution to make; it’s just getting it into written words that’s always the hard part.

I suppose I should also keep a record of my word count. It’s currently sitting at a little over 9,000 words. The upper limit of this chapter is 18,000, so I’m basically halfway there. At this rate, I should be ready to submit a revised draft to my adviser by the second week of May. That will mark roughly a month and a half of revision time which, for me, isn’t so bad.

Well, I’m almost at my 400-word limit. TLDR version: I wrote some stuff today, some of it coherent. Monday, I’m going to make sure 5 pages are ready. 

I can do this.