On Wednesday, I begin the first of three exams to qualify me for dissertation writer status. Fingers crossed! I'm surprisingly not nervous. It's just 40 or so well cited pages in a week, i can do that with no problem (my high school self is crying to hear me say that. Ah, those innocent days when I could spend a week polishing a five page paper... I'm not entirely sure I can even write a five page paper these days, what could I possibly say with any supporting evidence in that amount of space?). This is the area exam, so I'll mostly be going over dates and artifacts and the like, with relatively little of my own thought. The topic exam, with all of the theories I'll be using and how I'm putting my own mark on them, is going to be much more difficult, but I will leave that panic for its own time. I'm still annoyed by the fact that no one seems to know how this works. My chair sent me to ask the department admin, who gave me an entirely different story than my second reader had given me. It's so easy to mess up the process. Especially given that one of my readers has had a family tragedy and is pretty much out of it for the next few months. We'll probably last minute subsitute someone else, which has its pluses and minuses. Since they won't know what I''m doing, they could not comment much, and leave it all to the others who do... or they could be horribly offended that I haven't included their favorite authors and give me grief. Here's hoping for the former!

I haven't managed to write much here recently, and this is unlikely to change with the exams and all, but I'm going to try and be a little more regular! (Not that anyone actually reads it, so no worries!)