Day 1—Monday
For today, a change of tack. Having spent the weekend translating twelfth-century Latin charters for my dissertation, I’m going to spend today’s session cross referencing seven fifteenth-century papal bulls for an article I have in progress. (This counts as a change of tack if you’re a medievalist; for those of you following along who aren’t medievalists, a papal bull is a kind of official document issued by a pope, and has nothing to do with animals.) I’ve been putting this off for a little while because late medieval hands are out of my comfort zone (see above for an example of one I’ll be working on today—a wonderfully even but rather florid leaf. Reg. Vat. 44, f. 270.) If I can get this done, I can submit the article to a journal. Let’s see how far I can get today.
Progress Update: I made it through all seven bulls, and marked out the sections in two of them which will bear further exploration. Hopefully I will be able to get through them this afternoon.
Day 2—Wednesday
The journal article I was working on on Monday has now been submitted, so that’s a long-standing element of my Evernote to-do list that can be ticked off! Today it’s back to my dissertation. I’m going to again work on incorporating some more primary sources about Genlis into my case study, and doing more work on tidying up the overall structure of that section.
Session Goal: 500 words. 887 words.
Day 3—Friday
Thursdays, it seems, are not destined to be my productive days. Last Thursday I caught my fingers in a garage door (I have a nice bruise purpling up in the nail bed of my ring finger); yesterday, thanks to some nice Midwestern thunderstorms, the power was out for several hours which put rather a dampener on my plans to spend some time transcribing and translating several .pdfs. File under the setbacks you don’t anticipate having during your dissertation writing process.
Today I’m going to work on incorporating material from a conference paper which I gave on the historiography of Premonstratensian women into my dissertation. Since Friday is a longer writing day and since this involves less original composition on my part, let’s amp up the session goal for today.
Session goal: 1500 words. 2188 words.
End-of-week-total: 3075 words.
Look at you go! By the way, congrats again on the find!
You shame with your productivity. I shall catch up and redeem myself with inventory today.
This is awesome progress for a Monday.
Thank you my dear! The productivity does feel illusory, but I did just send off the article so that’s something to tick off my list, at least.
I overcame my nerves and submitted the article! I think I’ve earned a nice cup of (decaf) tea before bed as a reward.
What a great week, Yvonne! You’ve earned yourself many cups of tea. I’ve been avoiding thinking about the number of words I write but now I’m hankering the satisfaction of crossing those session word goals out! (…though a little afraid that when I count them up at the end of the session I’ll have to hastily readjust the goal so as not to embarrass myself…)
I’m glad to have earned the tea, because I think I’ll need it after last night’s weather sirens! The session word goal is a brute force method, though—it’s definitely a case of quantity over quality right now, and I have to remind myself that the editing can come later.