And Now at the Dissertation Lounge . . .

I've had three friends go through the academic system deep enough to end up with PhD after their names. One guy got his degree in chemistry, a task that I would consider absolutely more daunting that getting a PhD in, say, literature or communications. The other guy got his degree in history, but he did it in Portugal, which is "old Europe" and thus, at least to what I understand of education in Europe, a bitch. The third guy is hauling ass toward his PhD in biology, which I consider just about as daunting as a degree in physics or, even, chemistry.
     One way or the other, each of these people put in serious reading time and huge amounts of personal energy by way of study and memorization, plus research time -- which is the whole point of the paper chase in the first place, some folks believe -- and all the fears and frustrations of going into something so deeply that you end up looking like the comic book guy on the Simpsons, all nerdy and obsessively focused on every tiny little detail you could ever find about a corner of a molecule somewhere on the skin of a cell.
     Like that, yeah.
     Now, given this preamble, let me say straight up here and now that I am in no way comparing my experience of writing a novel with the experience of my three friends. Sure, it's been a pain in the ass, all the editing and spell checking and rewriting this and inserting this bit of text into that. I've sweated here and there over how it looks, at the currency or specificity of this or that bit of info that is supposed to inform the reader of where the hell whatever is going on takes place.
     But I really think that, after what looks like seven or eight months, not counting all the time I've thought about this or that part of the book just sittin' on the can or marching back and forth across the lawn with the mower, if this is anything like getting close to going for a PhD, I think I'll pass.
     There's all the data, first of all.
     You start out writing a book about a guy travels through time and space by way of having been found all dead and dried out in his little space ship by a very advanced extraterrestrial species, you're gonna run into trouble. Like the physics of time travel itself. That and the physics of going from one universe to another -- since true time travel would involve dimensional travel as well, given what little I understand of the physics of time travel.
     And then there's the geography of things.
     Where's this home world that this so-called "singularity species" called the Community come from? How'd it get to be like it is, this planet with this one organism covering it from sea to rippling sea? How does this species communicate with itself, given that it's got little brain nodes all over itself, everywhere it can stretch out and catch the sun on this home planet? And how'd they learn to travel through space and time?
     And how did they find the main character? How'd they revive him? Did they just do that once?
     I mean, you gotta settle that question, the grandfather paradox lookin' question about what happens if they send him further back in time than his own particular place in the timeline of the universe in which he was found.
     If they find him -- which is one temporal event -- and they revive him with a copy of himself -- which is another temporal event -- what happens to the universe he came from when he's sent back in time to before human beings were what they are today? It's another temporal event, this sending back thing, after all. So . . .
     Are you starting to get the idea here, chum?
     'Cause I already did a half dozen times in the back yard, sittin' on the can, walkin' down the street and, yes, and even while I was writing all this crap.

Holy shit is it a pile now!

At which point we go back to that dissertation & PhD interrogation thing.
     See, right now it's a 250 pages of text -- minus the few extra blank pages that are part of the typographic conveniences & the stuff book printers know about, with my access to such secrets being a completely different rant.
     At 250 pages of text, it's almost big enough to be somebody's dissertation and if not that big a deal, certainly a chapter in one. In a dissertation, that is. Thus, for all intents, I will say that writing this thing has been about the same amount of time at the keyboard as most folks I know would have spent on the their dissertation, counting in all the pre-writes and the chapter-by-chapter hacking away at making sure the point of all this scrivening is understood by the reader. By the dissertation review committee and all that, that much work.
     Only thing is, right here, there's a big difference between a dissertation on, say, a moderately well-known Latin American writer whose work spans not only decades but also political upheaval and a couple handful revolutions, juntas and take overs and the dissertation that my friend wrote for his chemistry degree.
     See, there's the hard science part of a PhD in chem or bio that just has to trump the artsy-fartsy work going into a dissertation about literature. Yeah, sure, there's dates and names and publication dates and political moments and all that. But you write a hard science dissertation, you have written about lab-assailed & assured facts. Numbers and figures, equations and the simple bottom line of literature being very much a soft science when it comes to what is.
     Science is about stuff you can prove beyond a shadow of a doubt.
     Literature is about stuff you can tie together with other stuff, some of it facts but most of it figurines, to make the literature important to talk about.
     Like William Faulkner, who, as far as I figure it with my meager credentials, is known today only 'cause somebody wrote a dissertation on him which might have become a book.
     And it's here that the whole bit about writing a novel versus a dissertation comes under bleak inspection.
     I think that I've suffered the work here on this book. I put in my time trying to get the physics of the book look at least something like the physics of the world I live in. I've worried the placing of the action, the actions of the characters, the interactions between various bits and pieces of the plot line, all that. I've worried out.
     And I've worked on making sure the typography makes the story legible and readable, that. Which ain't nothin' in a dissertation 'cause the review committee and all them overlords have their own ideas of what is good typography so get over it and stand up like a man!
     Dammit.
     So, yes, I'm whining. Big deal.
     But I think that what I've written -- beyond whether anyone later on writes a dissertation about it -- amounts to at least the same amount of work that a dissertation writer might have tossed into getting started on book of knowledge that every dissertation becomes. But I'm sure as hell not arrogant enough to think that my work on this book has any close glitter to the PhD that my friend is gonna have after his name in a year for spending all that time in the lab.
     It's nice for me to think of it that way. And it's nice for me to think that this book -- and the one I'm going to start on once I get through the hell of making this first one "perfect" (and oh, what perfectionism costs, my children) -- are dissertation quality.
     So I can hope.
     As if.