Revisions, Take One

I received comments on my abstract yesterday and spent the morning revising. That ultimately meant rewriting the entire thing. One would think that writing a page would be easier than writing a chapter, but it's not. Once again I am satisfied with the resulting version of my abstract, but the revision process was ugly.

Problem 1: The comments I received sounded much better than my writing. I couldn't come up with something new without using the same words my reviewer sent me. I managed to create my own version, but only with a constant temptation to just copy and paste what Dumbeldore wrote. Ugh. As an undergrad, other people's work always sounded better than mine, so why should it be any surprising when my mentor, who has 40 years' more experience in this field than me, describes my work and it sounds better than when I do it? Even if it`s not surprising, it's still annoying to try to come up with another way to describe the exact same thing.

Problem 2: Hubby's sub assignment for the day was cancelled. There was a glitch in the computer system, and two people were assigned the same sub job. The error was not in Hubby's favor, so he came home 7 hours before I expected him to. I should have gone to my office to work today, but since I thought I'd have the house to myself, I stayed home. Wrong choice. Instead of focusing on my abstract revisions, I blamed my lack of progress on every noise that Hubby made: opening doors, closing doors, jump roping outside, eating broccoli in the other room, and so on. Now I understand why he hated studying at home. Once Hubby finally left the house, I finished my abstract revisions.

Problem 3: Constantly changing the language settings on my computer. To type in special characters for linguistics (called IPA), I change the language setting on my computer to Icelandic. I'm not actually typing with an Icelandic keyboard, but my program for typing in IPA is set to Icelandic. This is not a problem. The problem is that whenever I switch back to English (which makes typing in English easier), I keep hitting a mysterious shortcut that switches my language setting to Canadian French. I never notice that it changes until I try to type single quotes, which end up looking European instead of English. Today I had to switch language settings at least 50 times. Not really that big of a problem, but annoying just the same.

I finally finished revisions, grabbed Indi's comments about my chapters, and ran out the door for an indoor plant conservatory. Entrance is free for county residents on Mondays as long as it's before 12:00. I arrived at 11:58 and the person manning the front desk still let me in for free. Yay! I sat in a humid, tropical world until my frustrations levels went down enough to read Indi's comments. 50 pages of text later, I felt relaxed and pleased to know that Indi's set of revisions for my chapters were much easier than Dumbledore's revisions for my abstract. Now to just take care of them so I can start Geraldine Chapter 3 tomorrow.