I went to bed at 9:30, feeling pooped. Then I tossed and turned for almost two hours before getting back up. Either it’s the coffee, the new job, or the weather. Sometimes I just can’t find the OFF switch for my mind.
Last night I had a mini-breakthrough with my thesis. I didn’t meet my first deadline to be done with a chapter by today, but I have made good progress. I was feeling tired and wanting to go to bed. I decided to read through the first seven pages one more time and then sleep on it. I wanted to see if I could dream up a better flow. Then, just when I had stopped trying, I was able to follow a thought all the way through – busting through the concrete of the old draft.
Part of me knows that big chunks of the old draft have to die – but it’s really hard to let go of that writing.
It reminds me of a final art project we did in a college drawing class; the professor asked us to cut out the best parts out of all our works and put them together in another way. It was one of those perspective-shifting moments – all my finished drawings suddenly turned into a pile of art material.
Looks like I am going to be cutting a wide swath through the Roland Barthes resonance section and the comparsion to the masochistic contract too.