Pick yourself up, dust yourself off, start all over again

Dissertation re-writing continues apace. I am finding it very slow going on the first chapter revision since it is essentially a new chapter I'm writing, though all the research is there and ready to be inserted as necessary.

The first chapter is the one that I envision laying out the kinds of issues specifically raised by the technologies that are represented in the later chapters, so I had originally written it as a kind of taxonomy of technologies. There were two problems with this:

1) Since I wrote it quite early, I included technologies that I probably don't need to include, and purely as a taxonomy, it became simultaneously dry and rambling. Double whammy for the reader, right?
2) It also was divorced from the literature. In its original incarnation, there was no mention of literary texts or how this would apply. This was because a) I wanted the introduction to deal with the connection between literature and social/technological issues, and b) as a taxonomy, I thought it would be too confusing to try to relate everything to a relevant literary text.

So I was really quite unhappy with the product (and the comments I got from early readings bore that out), but I didn't know what to do about it and it was hanging over my head as I continued to write subsequent chapters.

Luckily, another problem that I encountered when writing the last chapter provided a (potential) solution to the problem of chapter 1. When I was writing the science fiction chapter, I initially wanted it to address three novels (yes, I know that's a lot). Of course as I began writing, I realized I would be at the 70 page mark before I even dealt with the third one of those novels, so I knew I would have to cut one.

I had good reasons for having all of them in the chapter, so it was difficult to decide. But since I had written conference papers on two of the novels (The Calcutta Chromosome and The Stone Canal), I started writing up those ones for the chapter. Then I got to the 60+ page mark like I mentioned and realized the third wouldn't fit.

Then I had an epiphany while sitting on the beach in Barbados. What if I made the third novel, Natural History, the literary model for all that taxonomy stuff I want to do in the first chapter?

Since it had pretty much every kind of posthuman character in it, created by pretty much every emergent technology that I wanted to talk about, it seemed absolutely ideal as a way of modeling all the technologies while connecting them to a literary text.

I got terribly excited at the idea. Yes, I went geek-crazy over a potential solution to a writing problem. But I also immediately started worrying about it. After all, I don't think I've really seen this kind of move in a book before.

Now I know the dissertation isn't a book, but all the same, I'd never really seen someone start off a project talking about just one book to introduce the argument of the project, and then go off to talk in more detail about other books.

So I ran the idea past my advisor in that very hesitant I-have-this-crazy-idea-that-maybe-I'll-do-and-what-do-you-think kind of way. Surprisingly, she gave (equally hesitant) confirmation that that *might* be the way to deal with the problem in chapter one.

So here I sit, trying to match up all the technologies to all the characters and situations in the novel. It's matching up surprisingly well, but there is that little voice in the back of my head saying that maybe once I spend a month doing this, it won't actually work out the way I planned and this version of the chapter will be just as useless as the previous one.

But even if that little voice is right, I now have two versions of the first chapter to work with if a third needs to be created using a different strategy. So it's all good. I'll recycle what I can and rethink what I can't.

Thing is, the more I work with it, the more it seems to do what I want it to do, so I'm hopeful.

But, boy, is it a lot of work to entirely rewrite the thing from the ground up!