Prelims I.

prelims: universal abbreviation for the preliminary pages of a book before the start of the main text, often numbered in roman numerals.

preliminary examination, preliminary exam, prelim (an examination taken by graduate students to determine their fitness to continue)

Here I am, writing away on my prelims, and I'm noticing that it's an interesting journey of spurts of creative writing that wear down as I painfully squeeze the last bits of it out. Then I break. And I return and look at what I've done and wonder "Who wrote this tripe?" and try to salvage it by rearranging and restructuring it, and sometimes reframing my approach. Then I break, discouraged and defeated. And while "off task" I come up with some brilliant solution that I can't wait to implement, and when I get back to it I find that it's not quite how I imagined it, so I have to modify the brilliance to make it work, which ruins it.

Currently I have about 12 pages of body and 3 pages of sources. I will say that I'm surprising myself in how nicely all the "worthless" things I learned in the past four years are fitting in to the paper. I write something and ask myself: "where did that come from?" and think back to some book I read for some obscure class that (at the time) seemed like a total waste of time, and I think, "Well that was pretty smart! Wish I recognized it then..."

I think this first question will be finished by tomorrow.
[Update: I was wrong.]