I am so very close to submitting the first paper from my dissertation work. It is really shaping up, and I'm getting kind of proud of it. The end game is very weird, though, because the longer you work on something while feeling like it's almost done, the more it starts to feel like you will never actually be done. It's like the end of a race, when you can see the stupid finish line, and yet no matter how hard you run, it always stays in the distance. I have watched this paper go from about 10 pages of partial analyses just a few weeks ago to a whopping 46 pages of hard-fought argumentation, as of today, and I've still got a few more to go before I can really put the nail in the coffin. It just keeps expanding, though! The only thing I have left to finish up is the general discussion, at the very end, and I have notes for what I want to say, and all of the papers I think I need to cite. So in a way, it looks SO CLOSE to being done. And yet, I look at that (relatively short) list of papers I still need to discuss, and then I realize how much more reading I need to do before I can discuss them, because every "mention so-and-so here" note means I need to re-read 15 - 30 pages of someone else's work and think about how exactly it relates to what I'm doing before I can write that section. And then I end up with a few more paragraphs that are hopefully good, and fair, and well written, but every single one of those takes at least 30 - 45 minutes, and sometimes several hours.
And this is still my dissertation work! You know, the stuff I "finished" six months ago! I guess I knew it would be like this - that it's always like this... that this is the career I signed up for, after all - but I am continually amazed at just how long everything takes. I've been working on this project regularly, in earnest, for about a year now, and I'm just now getting to the point where it's close to being submitted to a journal. I think it has a good chance of being accepted somewhere decent, which is exciting, but it gets kind of daunting thinking about how many times I'm going to have to go through this very process! Of course, I can partially console myself with the knowledge that I will presumably get better at this sort of thing as I go, that this may be the hardest paper I ever prepare for publication, since it's my first one and all, but it is kind of daunting thinking about just how much time a project can take, and thinking about finding a way of accomplishing that once I have other significant drains on my time, like teaching, and faculty meetings, and advising students, and writing grants...
So... let's just assume that the paper writing, at least, is going to get easier as I go. It helps to realize that I haven't been at this very long at all, in the scheme of things, and that all of the researchers I admire have been working on this one tiny little piece of the puzzle that we're all working on for years now, and I just really got started a year ago. In five or ten or twenty years, I might not have to spend quite so long looking up papers and assimilating new information. I hope!
Okay, back to work now. I'm trying to submit this thing by the end of next week, and I think I can do it!
