I finished the revisions to the dissertation beastie. I think I have to try to get it published, because in writing it, the problems with my field stopped being funny to me and started getting a lot scarier. I think any new idea ought to be considered, and if I have one, I have a duty to put it out there for consideration. It can only help. For this permutation, though, here are the final stats (including footnotes):

Title: Violent Societies: Theory and Methods for Tracing the Patterns of the Lost Violent Monoply Pages: 689 Words: 220, 152 Characters (including spaces): 1,372,904 Paragraphs: 5,271 Lines: 22,746

You know what I’ve been asked a lot, and I still have no idea how to answer? “How long did it take to write it?”. Technically, one enters the dissertation phase after comps, which I passed about six years ago. I didn’t really launch right into the process, though, and it took me a few years, while working full time and getting a committee on board, to get my prospectus (research proposal) together and approved. Once my prospectus was officially approved, it was a little less than two years before I defended my dissertation. I would say that I did the bulk of the writing in less than a year, though. It was a slow start, probably taking me about 6 - 8 months between setting up the document by slugging in my prospectus and really getting rolling, then the rest of the project wrapped up a lot more quickly. Basically, the first couple of hundred pages took as long to write as the last five hundred, so I guess technically, the latter part was almost twice as fast. So yeah, not linear. None of those answers seems satisfying to the askers, either. Maybe I’ll figure out a better answer at some point.

It feels weird to be finished.