Under The Gun

I have a deadline looming to turn in material to my advisers; it's sometime next week. I had been working on a chapter since the beginning of July and making insufficient progress, in part because much of the extra time that I thought I would have when I put my toddler in preschool/daycare 3 days a week ended up getting spent thinking and worrying about the child and the childcare situation. In fact, we did end up switching him to a new daycare last week, which so far has been amazing -- (knock on wood) -- although he's only there 2 days a week instead of 3 because of scheduling conflicts.

But of course it wasn't completely the fault of sub-par childcare that I was suffering writer's block. I spent most of what time I did have just reading, reading, reading instead of writing and processing as well. I talked to a few friends who convinced me to stop working on the chapter and turn my attention to job application materials instead, since a job application deadline is also coming up. They were right. Once I decided to do that, I got a lot more done, and in fact it gave me a bit more perspective on the whole dissertation and thus the problem chapter (yes, sounds like "problem child").

I wish I had done this sooner! I stupidly assumed that putting together the job application would be a lot simpler than it is and so decided to put it off until after the chapter was finished. True, it's not as if I have to craft completely new material to write my job letter, especially since I have some excellent models from other folks, but it is still very much like putting together fellowship applications which, as I have written before, take a lot out of me. At least I have the material written down somewhere already; thank goodness I made the effort to apply for fellowships last year, because the text I wrote then is easily edited and thus lifesaving now.