Now there is a date for my final seminar, October 2, and a reader. So I just set a day to send him my manuscript and it gives me 100 days to finish writing and editing my book. I think that's doable.
I just had a meeting with my supervisor, who had read my manuscript to this point, and it went very well. I do not know why, but I always think that meetings like that end in disaster, along the lines of "This is terrible, what the hell are you doing?" but that never happens. I got good feedback and it was great to see how well he understood my text so far. He had a few points that I really need to address. One of them is my tendency to use a lot of empty intensifiers that just need to be edited out. No problem, I know they are there, but they always seem so reasonable when I first write them, and then I see later that they do not do anything or even weaken my text. Another thing is two long paragraphs describing my game examples, which are too long and need to be closer to my arguments. This is more difficult; I wrote them because I know art historians do not play games, so I wanted to do a thorough introduction early on; but he's right and there must be a way to shor
Today it was time to report to my doctoral supervisor Max. He asked me to summarize the three main parts of my text, and we talked about them and some more specific problems in some chapters, as well as writing techniques. All in all, it was a very good conversation. I wish I'd had more time to revise now, especially since I'd taken the whole Easter week off to do it, but unfortunately I was tired for a few days so I didn't really rewrite much. But I did have time to read my text and think about its structure and how to get a better flow in the argument. And this check-in was a continuation of that, so I'm hoping to get back on track with rewriting. We're also planning the date and opponent for my final seminar in the fall, so the goal is getting a little closer. I'm pretty sure I'll have to spend a lot of the summer rewriting, but that's to be expected.
So I had my last seminar for this semester and yesterday I had a check-in with my supervisor Max. There are two conclusions from this: First, that my text is slowly coming together and I have a handle on my work, and second, that there is still a lot of work to be done, including revising the immersion/flow chapter, which needs a better structure than what I presented at the seminar. Looking at my numbers, I still have 16 days until the first draft should be finished, and I've written 75% of the planned text. That's a good standing; there are two short and planned chapters I want to write in those 16 days, but the rest of the unwritten text needs to be finished when I'm a good bit into the revising and rewriting phase. So I maintain that I've almost reached my goals for this semester of writing and that I can finish the manuscript in a couple of months while working full time. Right now I'm reading Martin Jay's 1988 essay "Scoptic Regimes" in Hal Fost
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