Welcome and thank you for joining me on this adventure. For the newbies, you can catch up on previous post: first blog post, second blog post here, third blog post here, fourth blog post here, fifth post here, sixth post here, seventh post here and eighth post here.

This week was ‘hard’ in one sense and ‘easy’ in another sense! Let’s start with the easy bit: I really got into a roll of writing. I was just ‘vomiting’ out text upon text upon text as my ideas clicked into place. Of course some text were better than others but I tried not to overthink things too much but just to keep writing away. To a large extent this strategy worked well because the more I wrote (good, bad and terrible text), the more clarity I got about some of my thinking. The challenge was finding the long stretches of unbroken time to sit and/or stand to do the writing. There were a number of other things that demanded my attention which made it a hard week. It felt frustrating that I couldn’t fully focus on writing out all the sections required for the proposal. The other hard bit was the slow onset of imposter syndrome that crept in on me. Reading over some of the text I had written made me question some of my ideas. I wondered whether the ideas were good enough, whether my case selection was good enough and whether I will manage to develop the proposal well enough to meet the ultimate deadline. I felt the pressure of the internal deadline for feedback which I don’t think I will meet. I had to eventual give myself the permission to ignore the internal deadline and just focus on chipping away at the writing. I will have to get feedback from other people like you who is reading this 😁

At end of Week 6, I got into the rhythm of writing, sunk into imposter syndrome feelings and, found myself juggling too many competing deadlines and commitments. Yet, I managed to have ‘vomited’ out my thoughts into scattered texts both through my handwritten notes in my special A4 Notebook and also typed up into a big chunk of text on my laptop. For the typing I used different font colours for each paragraph of text as an indication of some good, some bad and some very terrible texts. Yet, much like last week, I feel very satisfied with the progress I have made with the research proposal this week.

Goals for Week 5: Next week’s goal is to finalise the initial “word vomit” rough draft of the research proposal by writing out all sections completely. Then I will begin to clean up the text by tightening things here and there, adding in some tables and making some figures and charts. I expect to be able to send out respectable draft of the proposal for feedback, critiques and questions. Would you like to help me improve my proposal by reviewing it and giving me feedback? Let me know and I will send you a copy….thanks in advance.

The adventure continues…see you next week Friday for the next instalment of the #NWOVididiaries blog post.