I’m finally into the swing of this thesis enough that I can spend (as I did today) a solid six or eight hours on it without getting distracted by other things.
I discovered a couple of things: it’s becoming harder to work out how to store my marginal musings that I plan to intersperse throughout the text without them being lost contextually as I write more of the core text. When I began this, I would write them in separate text boxes in InDesign but they lost their place quickly. Then I started writing them in a separate file in Word with plans to intersperse them, but then looking at the file, I forgot which bit of thesis text sparked the musing and therefore which bit they belonged with (if anyone wants proof that authorial intention is irrelevant, that has to be it, right?). So now I’m writing them into the main text and applying a character style (40% grey tint) which is supposed to remind me to pull them out and arrange them prettily in the margins right at the end.
That means keeping track of the word count is hard though. I’ve been assuming all along that the word count is the word count of the core thesis, and that my textual interventions, both quotes that I’m juxtaposing and the personal expositions, are not part of the count. If I ever actually get around to producing this electronically the way I want to, some of them will be hidden behind hyperlinks and there will be images and video and sound files too, but that’s unlikely at this time.
Anyhow, this has been your latest installment of meta-discussion of my thesis with not a moment of actual theory, because it’s still a bit of a mess in that sense. One thing I definitely know after today is that the logical thread in this one is very weak, Yoda. I plan to take the scissors to a printed version and see if I can’t put some of the related-but-currently-physically-separated bits back where they belong.