As I was typing up my daily thousand words on my dissertation today, I found myself procrastinating by visiting the GOG forum far too often. It got me wondering if there are any fellow GOGers out there busily writing/procrastinating on their own big writing projects?

When I finish for the day, I find a few minutes of mindless FPS play is a good way to unwind. Lately, it's been Serious Sam The Second Encounter.

Any other souls in the writing pit?

I sort of am, I'm at the point where I need to start writing my project proposal for my IT masters project. The semester doesn't officially start for another fortnight or so but I was planning to get a head start.

Then again I'm a naturally talented procrastinator so I may not start till march...

I wrote my dissertation (many years ago now) in one night. All 13,000 odd words of it. I actually had to cut out almost 70% of my subject matter (on feedback from my advising professor) as the end product would have exceeded the maximum word count allowed =(

Mind you, they also said I should just write the whole thing as book too. But I have no confidence in finding a publisher so never followed up on that. it too late now though as I no longer have my research notes.

Why not put off procrastinating until later? (See what I did there?)

It took me about a month to write my proposal. Of course, once I started doing research it quickly became obsolete! One night, very impressive! It's interesting you had a word limit, is that typical in your field?

Writing a dissertation, those were the good old days....NOT!

No idea if it's typical, but it was limit imposed by the department. I guess they wanted to limit the reading they'd have to do. They were fairly understaffed that year.

I was also quick with finishing the dissertation, it only took me 13 months.

Well, I'm trying to get a game together as fast as I can for my "senior project." I took the last week off though, so I'm trying to get back into it. Long projects are pretty taxing.

I had to write two dissertations last academic year (10000 + 8000 words) and have one for this year (12000 words) but fortunately I have a better schedule now. Last year I had to hand one of them in a week before my exams started.

The easiest way for me to avoid procrastination is to prepare a large amount of material in paper form, plow through it and take it to the library with me in order to type the dissertation (and only switch on the wireless when I absolutely need it).

Heh, it only took me 8 years to write my thesis... Thanks to my director who, for example, didn't think it was important to warn me he moved 600km away from my university!

So my thesis writing time was a good time... but not about the thesis! ^_^

How are you and Unity? Or did you switch to Unreal?

I'm writing my dissertation now as well.

I have three theses* to write, and only ~3 months to do so, and what's worse is that this doesn't cut down the amount of procrastinating I do... Today, for example, I told myself I was really going to start typing out the first of them, but I just couldn't get myself to do so. I still have a couple of hours in which to do some useful work, though.

*If thesis is what you write at the end of a non-divided, 10-12 semesters long university education; I'm not 100% sure about the English terminology.

I no longer am in college, but I still write. I run a personal political blog here:

http://informeddecider.blogspot.com/