now we sleep for an hour or two before bible study.

when I send off the dissertation this afternoon, which I shall, both of the first chapters, there is a list of things I’m worried about.

1. First chapter. Right now it’s an edited and expanded version of my concept paper. there’s not much more I can do with it right now until I’ve got more chapters written.
2. Quantity of Sources. For 65 pages, I seem to have very few sources considering the length. This worries me, and I’m guessing I’ll be told to add more in. Which will just make the thing longer, which I don’t have issues with, but right now I’m pretty happy with it, we’ll see what happens.
3. Transitions. These are probably the weakest right now.
4. Quality of sources. Sure there are few of them, but I think the quality is pretty high. I’m worried about quality on some of them. I’m even more worried about quality if I’m forced to add more in there.
5. April Fools day. In retrospect, I probably should have picked a more fortuitous day to send out my proposal (first two chapters of the diss). oh well.

on the other hand, at supper with my friend Dan tonight, he said something which didn’t really occur to me before…unlike regular papers, this isn’t really a one shot deal. Rather, it’s a send it in, and if it isn’t good enough, it’s sent back with the corrections that need to be made. That reassures me somewhat, but still.

Seriously, I don’t worry that I’m flat broke, but if a paragraph doesn’t smoothly transition to the next one, I get all uppity. Must be an english major/mythological phd thing.

so I found out (read: I finally got around to looking through the dissertation handbook) that the first thing you send your dissertation chair is the Proposal. Basically the first two chapters of your dissertation. I find this out after I had gotten my theory chapter after edits down to about 48 pages. So, basically, now I’ve got to figure out what to do for my first chapter.

I think most people just use their concept papers in edited form, so that’s what I’m going to do. I’ll spruce it up a bit and see how that rolls. It’s kind of annoying, since I’ve got maybe about a page intro and half a page for a conclusion left to write ont he theory chapter and then I’m done with that. But, such is life.

I can’t imagine they’re asking for a great deal of awesomeness on the first chapter since that’s going to have to be edited by the time I’m completely done with the dissertation anyway. Good thing I’d planned and doing an all nighter anyway. This thing is going out tomorrow.