Shonell in TCR Land

Early, early in the new day of December 15, I was finishing up the last project of my first semester in the doctoral program when a question popped into my head: “How many words have you written this month?”

For a second, I thought I was back in November; last month, I participated in NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month, in which you write 50,000 words toward a novel within the 30 days of November.

THAT was a crazy month, writing just over 50,000 words for a book while working on projects for school.

When November 30 arrived, I was so happy to be done writing.

But I realized the writing never stopped.

I just went from NaNoWriMo to DocWoWriMo, Doctoral Work Writing Month.

And I’m SO glad that, unlike NaNoWriMo, DocWoWriMo only lasted two weeks!

But I wrote a lot in those two weeks.

How much?

First, let me tell you how much I’ve written in the last six days. I wrote and turned in a project every day from December 10 to December 15, and in that time span, I wrote 17,823 words, about 2,971 words A DAY. If this were NaNoWriMo, I would be gunning down over 89,000 words in 30 days!

In the month of December, I wrote a grand total of 30,591 words, about 2,039 words a day. Slower overall than the last six days, but even at that clip, I would clear over 61,000 words in 30 days.

Why does any of this matter?

I guess because right now, I’m starting to think about all I’ve accomplished this semester.

Those 30,591 words I turned in this month do not include the 10,000 extra words (and probably more) that were in papers that were cut to turn in final projects closer to the word count requirements.

Those 30,591 words only include this month. They don’t include the write-ups for classes or the critiques or the annotated bibliography or the literature review, or the…and the list goes on.

Those 30,591 words do not include the 100s and 100s of thousands of words I read this semester in books and articles so that I could be prepared for class, so that I could write the thousands and thousands of words I wrote in all of my projects.

And here are two cool things about all of this:

1- I can actually read some of these theorists and philosophers–like Foucault, Bakhtin, and even Derrida–and and almost get them.
2- I can actually write ideas about many of the things I learned about this semester.

I don’t know about you, but that’s pretty cool in my opinion.

More words to come later. Next Tag Cloud moment will probably be in about a week or so when I write about who I am as a researcher…well, really, who I think I am as a researcher.