your time begins now...

(The title refers to that liminal moment when you've done all the preparation for a huge exam. Sitting in the classroom, you are awaiting its start, and with the anticipation rising, the professor makes the announcement. That moment is this post).

There's a new layout of this blog. I'm revamping its design and structure in preparation for the next stage of my academic development. I have spent this past semester in an ethnomusicology class, conducting fieldwork and oral history interviews with the local women's music club. The background research required of this assignment has only further solidified that I have a dissertation topic. It was a meandering path for the past year, but I know the basic gist of what I'll be writing for the foreseeable future, and so now I must begin to roughly sketch it out. Currently I'm still very much in the "background research" reading and methodology outlining phase, but I'm beginning to formulate ideas, case studies, and drafts that need to be chronicled somewhere. As per my advisor's suggestion, it is time to start free-writing to get the process going. Hopefully that means I will generate more content on this site.

I've decided that I will keep a running daily record of the status of my research. Again, suggested by my esteemed advisor as  "a way of getting squirmed down into the chair" (which he learned from Steinbeck). That journal will be placed in my personal notes, thoughts not to be published to the entire world (because really, no one should have to read them). But periodically, I will update here with a couple different kinds of posts (which I will label for easy sorting, if anyone cares for greater organization). Descriptions as follows:

-- general framing, ideology of dissertation (label: diss concept)
-- stories/summaries of individual women, events, or phenomenon (label: diss storytime)
-- important quotations, ideas, or insights derived from specific texts (label: diss lit)
-- memorable primary sources that I've tracked down (label: diss ex's)

This is the next step.... No more anxiety. No more cowboys or Indians for a while. I made a promise to myself over a year ago, and now I am paying up.