draft one is done

Is it really done if it's a draft? Whatever. I just sent the draft of my conceptual territories paper to my advisor so it's done for now and I refuse to think about it again until she gets back to me with her feedback. It was slightly longer than 12 pages (like 3 lines over) which means if anything I'll have to cut stuff, which is more fun than adding stuff. The hardest part about this paper was narrowing my thinking. There is SO much I've read and could say about these four thing and figuring out what I wanted to say the most and fitting it into a 12 page paper was really difficult. There were things I started to write about that I would have liked to write more about, but couldn't really because of the nature of the paper. But I'm done with it, for now at least.

Next up is the Selected Questions paper. And all those little annoying reflection papers.

what happened to my motivation?

I finally managed to look at my conceptual territories again since I've gotten feedback from my writing group. Only took a week to get to this point. I have to send my draft to my portfolio advisor Thursday and I just can't make myself actually work on it. There is a stack of things I want to read and I can't get myself to do that either. It's not like I'm doing anything really cool or fun instead. Why am I so unmotivated?

I'm also really annoyed that as soon as this draft is "done" I need to start working on the next one. I just got my "selected questions" approved by my other advisor and I'm probably more interested in writing about those than writing about conceptual territories. But right now the thought of it makes me want to go hide out in cave somewhere or something.

All I can say is that I better get a damn job after this.

battling this first draft

A big problem I have with writing long-ish papers is the fact that I at some point have to go back and read what I wrote. I hate doing this because I usually only notice how stupid I sound. So it's good that I have this writing group, because they can read it for me and tell me how much it doesn't make sense and I can fix things without tirelessly re-reading my ramblings so much.

I need to email my group a draft of my paper today, and it is nowhere near ready for human consumption. I just opened the document and sort of shuddered because I didn't even want to look at the thing. I know what I want to write about, sort of, but actually doing it is a struggle. Searching through the jumble of words I've already written to find the perfect spot to insert whatever new thought entered my brain while I was unable to fall asleep. But I am working on it.

Portfolio-ing

I stopped blogging here for some reason. I could say I've been too busy with school, but that wouldn't be entirely true. But I can say that now I plan to post somewhat regularly and with a purpose! You see, I'm going to be finishing my masters program in December and an essential step in doing that is completing and presenting my "Learning Portfolio" so I can prove that I've learned what they wanted me to learn in the program and it wasn't a complete waste of everyone's time.

I won't bore you (or myself) with the details, but basically the portfolio consists of two long papers (12 pages) and several short papers/reflections. We have to send drafts of our longer papers to our portfolio advisers a predetermined times, and the first one is due September 1.... which is very soon. This first paper is about the "Conceptual Territories" of the Reading/Writing/Literacy program, which are: interdisciplinarity (not even a real word), inquiry, diversity and change. How vague, right?

I've been trying to tackle each conceptual territory at a time and I've got inquiry, diversity and change started in a way that almost makes sense. I've been struggling with interdisciplinarity because what does that even mean?

I have a little over a week to figure it out and put it all together, so I'll let you know how that goes.

Oh, and I've got this kitten now and she tries to eat all my books/pens/post-its. It's cute half of the time.