#a finished dissertation...

I hope that no one experiences the day I had today, ever.

I was going to be defending my dissertation tomorrow at 4pm, until things went sideways. Evidently my chair is the only person who felt I and my work was ready for that.

So I talked with my chair, who is in communication with another committee member--they are friends in addition to colleagues, and the graduate coordinator for my school and they felt I could still get things done in time to graduate in the summer without any extra paperwork.

This morning I got an e-mail from said coordinator who said he got another e-mail from the graduate college with concerns about my ability to get it done by then. I'd really love to know why the graduate college is getting involved, as well as who keeps talking about this with the graduate college instead of at least my chair if not me as well.

I have feedback from the one committee member. I've addressed 2/3 of it, with the last 1/3 needing more time and attention. Something I'd rather do after getting feedback from my other committee member. But I've heard nothing from him since we agreed on tomorrow for dissertation defense. He's had my work for around 3 weeks now. I just need his feedback at this point. I e-mailed him asking about it earlier, so hopefully he'll get back to me tomorrow. If not, I may have to see what steps I need to take since he's not responding. It's holding things up at this point.

It is so frustrating to be at this point and have so much out of my control. It's also frustrating to have so many people outside of my committee involved in this. This is not typical. And it's very frustrating.

Now I'm going to go back to editing the last three lecture videos I need to have done for the online course I'm teaching starting Monday. Once they're added to the course, I only have to grade their work. I'm trying to focus on the things I can control so I can make more space to work on the dissertation once I have everything I need.

I'm slowly revising chapters based on my chair's feedback. Chapters 1 and 3 were not hard. I was surprised at how little I need to revise in chapter 3, honestly. It's the music chapter and my chair's an ethnomusicologist, so I figured he'd have more feedback, but there were few changes to make. It also surprised me because the chapter is over 30 pages long. I thought he'd want me to make cuts for length. ::shrugs:: Fine with me.

Chapter 2 is trying to kill me. He pointed out that I didn't really talk about race and class and a couple of other things in the chapter. It took me until earlier this week to finally figure out how to do this without starting over. I'm using Hamilton's life as my guide, addressing parallels between him and hip-hop. I've also taken out some sentences that he had comments on where if I had followed the comments, I would be doing so much more writing.

I have one paragraph to finish, possibly add another, and revise the conclusion before it is done. I set a deadline to have it done by Tuesday and I think I can meet that easily.

Once this is done, I can move on to chapter 4, which I have been looking forward to because I looked over some of the feedback and there is not a lot to revise. Considering it is the chapter about the metaculture of the show, which is my comfort zone in this whole thing, I am so happy!

My first year of grad school, one of my friends in the cohort ahead of me told us how she used #NaNoWriMo to help her work on her thesis. It gave her a reason to write every day for a month. Granted, just getting it done should be reason enough, but we all now that doesn't always work.

This is the third time I've done NaNoWriMo. I was going to use it to get a draft of an article done. But I decided to add work on chapter 1 of my dissertation as well. I didn't set my goals too high, 10,000 words each, which works out to around 323 words per day. 10,000 words is the highest word limit I've seen for publication in a journal, so that gives me a good first draft to work with. 10,000 words for my dissertation is a good thing to add and fill out that first chapter.

I'm also including revisions made to existing work in my word counts. Both have writing already done for them, and I want them to work with what I'm writing up instead of starting completely over. Also, I really want that article word count to reflect the entire article, not just what I've added.

When I posted that I'm doing dissertation work for NaNoWriMo on FB, a friend was intrigued about what I count since there is a lot of the writing process outside of getting words on the page. The way I see it, NaNoWriMo is for getting words on the page. I have other challenges I can complete that are broader in scope and refer more to spending time writing rather than word count.

I'm making a point of working on each every day. I want to get at least 323 words written for each every day this month. I'm hoping that will help me develop a better writing habit and get more work done on the dissertation and whatever other project I actively decide to write on.

I'm sitting here typing up notes and I think I finally figured out how I should be approaching my dissertation this whole time. Back when I was first getting into Hamilton and realizing it would be a good way to go with my dissertation (while I was finishing up my first year of my master's and working on my thesis), I took a class called "Music as Popular Culture." My professor (also my mentor/chair) suggested I write my paper autoethnographically and make it about my descent into Hamilton fandom/obsession.

I was a bit stressed at first because he is an ethnomusicologist. Ethnography and music are his areas. But it turned out to be a great paper that I've presented at a conference and at BroadwayCon.

So, I'm typing up notes that include some professor (who I think is white) being very dismissive of rap and hip-hop and relating to them because pre-Hamilton me would have been reacting similarly. That's when it hit me: there's no reason my dissertation can't be guided by my own experience. Queue the facepalms.

It's even how I'm mostly arranging my chapters! Why didn't I think of this before?!

Now I just need to get those interviews done and get writing. Something tells me I am not going to be done by May like I wanted, but I just might have a full draft done by then.