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, eighth post here and the ninth post here.

How do I describe this week? Well, I just can’t find the words to capture it. This is in a way the story of this week – clarity in my head but a struggle finding the words to capture my thoughts. At the end of last week I sort of gave myself the permission to miss the internal ‘draft-for-feedback’ deadline. But I later found out that I was mistaken about the due date of the draft submission. The deadline was one day later than I had thought. It meant that I did have one extra day to clean up the word vomit into a presentable draft even though parts of the sections were unwritten. In the end, I managed to submit the draft on Tuesday morning and I had this sense of relief descend on me. It meant that I could just about catch my breath before getting back on the grind from Wednesday. I struggled to produce new text. It was as if the word vomit channel was blocked.

Reflecting on this week took me back in time to my PhD days when I looked forward to checking out the daily post on the PhD Comics website. Those comic strips offered humorous comfort then that I was not the only struggling PhD student. Writing is just hard work! So I will keep this week’s post short, succinct and snappy. They say a picture is worth a thousand words so I offer you 2000 words in the form of two comic strip from PhD comics.

At end of Week 5, I remain satisfied with what I managed to achieve in terms of the proposal development – even if not all sections have been drafted. I managed to clean up the word vomit and submitted that for feedback. I got to take a bit of a break and catch my breath. I struggled with writing but made some progress in producing new text. Now I don’t feel like the proposal is ‘all-consuming’ of my mental space. I can take a bit of a distance from the ideas and text and come to it with fresh eyes.

Goals for Week 4: Next week’s goal is to finalise all sections of the proposal and shape it into a solid first draft. It will mean that I have to re-edit and re-edit the text to bring it within range of the word limit. I am currently way over the word limit even though not all sections have been written up. Once I have a solid first draft to outdoor, I will then send it off to as many people as possible for feedback, remarks, comments, suggestions and critiques. My request still remain: 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 by end of Friday 20 March ….thanks in advance.

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