And I am done. I just finished my work on this version of the manuscript. Now, I just have to go over it to see if everything is in order and recheck a couple of sources. And then, I will send it to my heroic reviewer who will give me the final verdict as to whether it makes sense to try to publish it as a book.
This was a lot of work, people. I had to excise an entire chapter in the middle and write a completely different one. This is not a collection of short stories but a coherent whole (at least, it’s supposed to be that). Which means that the entire concept of the book had to be rethought. I’m happy that I finished it on time and didn’t mess up the reviewer’s schedule. I’m also happy that for the next week I will not have to sleep, eat and walk around with the word Bildungsroman on my mind.
Yesterday, I felt exhausted and was complaining to N., “And what if the reviewer says that the manuscript is just a pile of steaming shit? How will I feel then? It will mean that I wasted my entire summer. I achieved nothing over the summer except submitting two articles for publication, submitting a talk to the philosophy conference, advancing my literary translation significantly, and working on this manuscript. I’m useless!”
Then we both paused and burst out laughing.
I think I did good, my friends.
This is great! 🙂 I’m somewhere around 40,000 words (I believe) on my PhD thesis. Sometimes it seems like there is no end to it. But wait, there actually is one: The submission deadline in one and a half months!
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Congratulations compañera! That’s a huge amount of work for just one summer!
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Gracias, amigo! I can’t wait for the semester to begin to have a vacation from this vacation. 🙂
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Finishing a book is a major landmark for any scholar. Much more than an essay or an article, a book represents a significant part of what a person has become. Its completion marks you out as someone who possesses stamina and who can commit substantial amounts of time to a single project. Most academics in any subject do not possess or acquire that level of discipline.
So allow yourself a degree of self-praise, whatever happens to the particular manuscript. When you once complete a book, you always have many more within your capacity.That is the moast important pay-off of all.
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Thank you so much for the words of encouragement, Charles Rowley!
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