Siliceous and Delicious

I’m definitely coming down with something, I realized when I woke up at 3 this morning with the distinct sensation that I must have swallowed several razorblades since going to sleep. This convinced me that a prudent course of action was not to get up at 6 but see if a lie-in might help—and it did. A few hours of more sleep, several courses of salt water gargling, gallons of tea and vitamin C later, I do feel much better and ready to face the thesis.

Picked up with the writing I had left off on yesterday, feeling much more confident. Why did I cull the data? Well, because a lot of the genera and characters I had chosen had almost no valid states in them. That’s the truth, and that’s what I’m going to write—if the reviewers don’t like it, I can always change the story later. But I decided that I’m going to (mostly) write this up as it is, not try to completely hide the process in some hyper-abbreviated, airy-fairy way. I started with 123 characters and ended up with 74 after an arbitrarily chosen culling threshold—and that’s what I’m going to write, end of story.

Spent what was left of the day happily typing away, very slowly, but feeling good about it. Diverting from writing to bits of the analysis I had said I’d do, but hadn’t gotten to, like comparing the sparseness of my data matrix to that of a couple of Foote’s matrices. This approach is working well for now, and I’m going to stick with it and see where it gets me for the next couple of days.

Tinker also made a valuable suggestion—to choose the 5 or 6 essential figures to include in the paper, and craft the text as an explanation of and segue between each. I think I’ll try the first approach on the methods, then switch to the second? In any case, a better day today. Focus is good, motivation is improved, and I’m on my way. It might be creepingly slow, but I am writing. It has begun.