Thesis Thursday: I DID IT!

Thesis Thursdays is a weekly(ish) feature where I rant, love and talk about young adult books I’m reading because I’m conning my college into thinking this is all for academia! Find out more here!

If this were a movie, I think this is the point where I’d give some great speech about how I always knew I could do it. But, here’s the thing: considering that I had three panic attacks on Monday before it was even noon, I did not think that I could do this.BUT HERE WE ARE.

The chapter was due Wednesday. I finished it Tuesday. GO ME.

I finally, finally got all my reading done in time to spend all last Saturday writing the beginning of this paper. I spent (rounding) 5 straight hours, left for dinner with friends, and then 3 more straight hours just pounding away. That first night, I got up to 14 pages–which honestly wasn’t that great. I thought that I only had one more section to write and then my conclusion, and the paper at that point felt really lacking to me.

Enter Sunday. I just had to take that day to myself, meaning that I needed it to do all the homework I had for Monday and that left me no time for thesis writing. I let it go and pretended that that didn’t bother me. (It did.) However, in thinking about it all day, I realized that I needed to add a section, so I really needed to write TWO more sections and my conclusion and also rewrite my intro.

Which is why I had all those panic attacks on Monday. My Mondays have a really long schedule, and I wasn’t sure I’d even sleep that night. But I hunkered down and finished the paper and I even slept that night. VICTORY IS MINE.

In the end, it ended up being 24 pages. Between that and the 29 page first chapter, I’ve already hit the minimum page requirement for this thing. And there’s one more chapter to go. I must really hate myself.

I realized something, though, that is trending between my first two chapters. It’s not intentional. My first paper, “Taming of the Tropes: How the Female Assassin in YA Literature Showcases the Biggest Issues and Best Possible Subversions of YA’s Most Popular Tropes” (working title), is all about the content of YA books, and how they claim to include these strong female characters but the publishers are LYING. This second chapter, tentatively titled “Masking the Issues: The Commodification of Young Adult Book Covers” talks about how publishers are putting more and more effort into producing covers of quality but not texts of quality.

Basically, I’m calling out big conglomerate book publishers for being liars.

Whoops?

Alright, yeah, there’s a lot more to it, and I still love YA A LOT. Just consider it part of my continued effort to get all readers of young adult a genre that actually speaks to them like humans rather than formulaic tropes that are packaged in shiny covers.

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