Writting

I'm so happy to be reading about everyone's InaWriMo progress. It reminds me of why I started my blog last November. I was stuck far away from dissertation state writing my dissertation from home all alone and needed a supportive network. Yeah bloggers for providing that for me. Although I wasn't able to participate this year I'll give everyone an update of my "working for free" status.

I submitted two manuscripts from my dissertation to the special journal issue I was invited to submit to. One made the deadline of Nov. 4th and the other was submitted on the 5th (editor said this was ok). I'm very happy with the first one but the second one might need a lot of revisions, but I hope it gets accepted. That data is very tricky because there is a lot of it and the patterns aren't always exactly the same from site to site. I tried not to draw too many antidoctal conclusions and put all of the raw data into supplemental data. I though I'd go the simple route and then could add more interpretation depending on the questions of the reviewers.

The co-authors from "long-ass" time ago manuscript and I have been e-mailing. We have decided to dedicate the first week of December to getting this bad boy out the door again. A month ago I went through the reviewers comments and thought about how to correlate them into the manuscript. I wanted to work with the raw data again but didn't have the program needed. So sometime this month I need to look through my notes again and make a good plan of what should be accomplished (in my mind) and send that to co-authors in preparation for the dedicated week. Then on my day off that week I'll meet them in their office so I can use the program the data is in.

Manuscript "0" is trucking along very slowly. In, maybe, August my Ph.D. adviser decided we needed some more measurements and that another student of his could analyze them as she was going to be learning that piece of equipment for her own samples. I asked him of this status last week and his only comment was that this student is now pregnant-due in Jan/Feb. I don't know this student very well so I haven't decided if I should e-mail and congratulate her and ask the status of the samples. Or if I should just keep going through my Ph.D. adviser. The analysis doesn't require the use of any chemicals and my samples are just soil water, not very comtanimated and surley nothing is volitle in them, so it should be safe for a pregnant women to do. It has been almost a year now since the comments came back on this manuscript. Yes it has gotten a major overhaul but I'm starting to care less and less about it but still have that nagging feeling that I've spent so much damn time on it already I'd like to get it published. If the samples haven't been analyzed by the end of the year I'm either going to have to go with what I have or give up on it.

There are more chapters from my Ph.D. dissertation that I could think about publishing but I'll save that for another time. This week I'm enjoying having few responsibilities.
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I'm enjoying my job a lot. Learning new things, meeting new people. Lots of field days. My first two weeks were about 35 hours each but this past week was only 25. I have two field days this week, which will help with my hours, but I'm hoping to get involved in more projects.

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