And so...

I emailed my panel organiser and bless her she emailed back very quickly. She is in my department and the nicest person ever, but as yet I haven't met her. I am so shy and silly.

Anyway, the email said that academics are really slack when it comes to handing in papers for conferences and often only write really rough papers and just throw their ideas together, nothing very special, and often only just before the conference. So she said I should juust copy and paste some stuff from my chapters and leave it at that - see it more of an opportunity to get some ideas together than anything else. She also referred to a journal article she had submitted elsewhere and how she had taken a chunk from that for this conference and will intersperse it with new research she is doing atm... so a paper for a conference is clearly very different from a journal article, and I would say definitely secondary to...

Which is great as it means the 15 Sept won't be a deadline for anything at all, or not one I can't make in some kind of rough draft even if at the last minute. It also means I can stop worrying at the opening sentence of my introduction quite so much. Only problem is that I still have a mountain of work to do as this paper is full of new writing and ideas, so can't copy and paste anything really unless I change it and that may take ages in itself! And then what would I do? Write this paper up for my PhD anyway! SOOOO despite the deadline worrying me, I should write this up anyway, keep it simple, and use the deadline of around a months time to get this work done and then move on to the next chapter.

DF is cooking me some eggs and it is making me feel quite sick! How strange. Must be a Beanie thing.

Today I will just battle on then, but try not to worry so much while I am doing it and, well, almost enjoy it? I don't mind my work, its the deadlines that make me fret. But i have over a month to write this! Woo!

x J