I’ve been working on a long paper / rough dissertation draft for my advisor. As of this morning I was up to about 30 pages, including both smooth-ish text and some notes to myself, along with some text retained from earlier drafts of this effort.

As this eventually needs to get into the standard dissertation template, and it’s easier to write in the required template than to write someplace else and copy into the template (Word formatting quirks can be a royal pain in the butt), I decided to transfer my writing to date into the dissertation template and continue writing from there.

A double-spaced template is a wonderful thing. I instantly went from a 30 page draft to one exceeding 70 pages. By the time I was done writing for the day, I was up to 78 pages total. That assumes I don’t do any more writing, but I probably will. I have plans for a nice cigar and a glass of Scotch this evening, and I always write better with a stogie to stimulate the muse.

I met with my advisor on Wednesday the 12th to discuss the status of my research, my progress to date, and his comments on an outline I have him back at the start of the summer. (The outline was supposed to be the skeleton for a journal article that would in turn be a very high-level rough draft of my dissertation. I even sent him a draft of the article. But I guess he missed that.)

Anyway, he had comments on my outline. Nothing too outrageous, just some additional topics to mention. But he sent me off to begin fleshing it out, and he told me to go into all the depth I could — getting to 120 pages was not a problem at all. This encouraged me to think that this is in fact the start of my dissertation, so I asked him how realistic it would be to graduate by the end of the calendar year.

His reply was that it depended on how much writing I could do combined with whether my committee thought I needed to do any additional work beyond what I’ve already done. He also mentioned that we may want to convene my committee again in October to show them my results to date and discuss the matter with them.

So, it would appear I am actually writing my dissertation, or at least an early draft. I’ve been head-down on it all weekend, and with the original draft material I had I’m up to about 25 pages including references.

I really am starting to glimpse the light at the end of the tunnel. But it remains to be seen whether it is the exit or an oncoming train. Only time will tell.