Not much to report here except a severe sleep deficit and two pages of the introduction to Chapter 1.

Two pages may not sound like much, but that opener is always so hard to write--it needs to be brisk and lively as well as setting up the relevant problems and background, but for me an equal problem is that I literally can't write page 2 until I've written page 1. (What this means is that sometimes I'll spend days writing the first two pages, so's I can move on, only to wind up completely scrapping those pages in a revision. Dumb, but I'm very much one of those let-me-try-saying-this-so-I-can-see-if-it's-actually-what-I-mean people.)

I think these pages are actually pretty decent--and I have high hopes of finishing a draft introduction before I go to bed tomorrow night--but right now I'm so sick of my own voice that it's hard to tell whether I'm just becoming a self-parody. Every time I catch myself in a typical phrasing, intonation, or sentence pattern, I'm irritated. I generally pride myself on what I think is a strong and distinctive writing voice (or to use my advisor's possibly less enthusiastic term, "eccentric"), but when it bugs, it bugs.

Oh, and speaking of my advisor? No word back from her about Ch. 4. Not even a "thanks for sending this along; I'll get to it soon."

Well, one of two things will happen: either she'll say it's good enough, with some clean-up and a conclusion, to submit, or she'll say it's not, and that will pretty much determine whether I wind up with a 2005 or a 2006 degree (INRU only approves dissertations twice a year, so if I can't get this thing in shape by mid-September, it's not going anywhere until March). And I guess either one is okay; I just want to know what I'm shooting for!

In other news: pleasant day today at Schmancy. And no further vermin to report.

And so to bed