Write, Rewrite, Repeat as Necessary

Peer Review (Photo credit: AJC1)

My memoir is finally finished, unless I come up with something to add to it before class today.  After the peer review last week, I decided to do a fresh draft; the story just wasn't cooperating with the point I was trying to make.  It seems to me that the problem was that I really wanted to say something about sisters.  I have two, Rebecca and she who shall remain nameless.  The nameless one is the focus of the story, but I came to the conclusion that I should put Reb in as a contrast to her.  The new draft was better, but it was over the maximum length, so that had to be fixed, and so on.

I never spent so much time on so short a paper in my life.

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Why I'm Losing My Mind

Well, it's not because I don't have enough material to draft my paper, or because I waited too long to start, or because I haven't given it enough thought.  I'm pretty sure that I feel like I'm going crazy because I've never written a paper like this one before.  The peer review is Friday (today's Sunday), and this entry is supposed to be about problems I'm having.  The way it's going so far is that I keep thinking of stuff I needed to put in my outline but didn't, so every time I finish one task (for lack of a better word), I have to go back and put something else ahead of what I just wrote.  In other words, this thing is growing in every possible direction, and it may be totally out of control.

The one "task" that's given me the most trouble is defining a term:  action hero.  I guess that if I knew more about action/adventure stories in the 1800s, I'd be able to come up with a more scholarly definition that would take that into account.  As it is, I'm basing the definition on a couple of sources (the Tasker article and the one about Gladiator), and I think/hope I've finally got it to work.

The argument itself is shaping up okay, thanks to that Slate.com article.  I'm refuting it point by point.  My conclusion sucks.  That's the next big problem.

Speaking of peer reviews, my feed just popped up a batch of articles about a group of academics "corrupting" the process of academic publishing.  Take a look:

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