I think I need a new man

Everyone says that the first chapter of the dissertation is the hardest. To this I can attest. I've been working on chapter one for almost a year now. I think the official anniversary is some time next month. Every couple of weeks, I think I'm almost done but then I realize, or my advisor tells me, that it needs just one more round of tweaking to be good.

The hardest part about being near the end but not quite finished is the anticipation of chapter two. I've been reading, thinking, and writing about Henry James for probably an average of at least 8 or so hours a week for the last 12 months. My next chapter is most likely on Freud. And to tell the truth as much as I love the fat old man who's practically there next to me when I lie down to sleep at night, Sigmund Freud is starting to look very tempting.

Another problem with writing a chapter for so long are the thoughts about how much more quickly I'll complete the next one. Everyday, I discover a mistake that I'm sure I'll just calmly step over the next time around. But it makes having committed those errors that much more unbearable. For example, in my first few drafts, I wrote too much about small details that weren't all that important for the larger argument. When I should have just started by writing out the main idea. This is why my first drafts were around 60 pages, plus 30 or so pages of crap, when my final will be around 40. It's like I waiting till the end to build the engine of a car and then doing so from scratch on the inside.

Anyway. Soon I'll be able to break it off with Henry James. And once I'm done writing a chapter on him maybe I'll actually get around to all those novels of his I haven't had time to read because I'm too busy reading passages in the one book that really matters for the 100th time.