Friday 1st July = Official Mumbling and Stuttering Day

The first drafts of chapters three and four are done.  Woohoo!  Now I need to start on chapter five, then decide whether I'm going to do chapter six for the dissertation as well.

I've had the figure of '15,000' in my head for a while now when thinking about the dissertation but it wasn't until last week that I thought I probably ought to check that, and only at the weekend did I actually get round to doing so.  As it turns out the word count for the creative part is 15,000-20,000 giving me, potentially, another five thousand words.  So here's the question: given that I am aiming for my chapters to be 5k each, do I do an additional chapter?

I've got a loose plan of chapter six, so there'd be no problem there.  I think the issue is in my inability to shut up, meaning that despite my aims for word limits, the reality will inevitably be different.  This can already be seen in chapters three and four.  Chapter three is just over 5,200 words.  Chapter four is just over 5,400.  If this trend continues, I'm going to be over 20,000 words if I choose to do chapter six as well.

Of course there's the delightful editing process, where I read through my pieces again and again simply trying to cut the word count down.  Do we get a 10% margin for dissertations?  I do love my 10% margins...

I guess I'll just have to run this by my supervisor on Friday.  The first meeting!  *Dramatic drum roll*  This is the point in the process where I try to talk about my work, end up making very little sense and probably sound like I didn't even read my piece, let alone write it.  At least I can take comfort in the fact that said exercise doesn't count towards my mark, otherwise I really would be doomed.

The Litmus launch is also this Friday.  I believe the idea is for us to read our pieces aloud.  This is the point when I realise there's a horrible jarring sentence in a crucial bit of the story, which every agent and publisher in the world will see.  I will be put on some sort of black list and any time I try to submit a manuscript big warning buzzers will go off and my efforts will be automatically discarded.

Or something like that.

What I will have to keep in mind is that even if I do find a mistake, it's too late to do anything about it now anyway.  Crying/spilled milk and so on.  To be honest, as long as my surname has been spelled right for once I'll be as happy as a bird with a french fry.