block be gone!

Yesterday was the first full day that I actually stuck to my dissertation-writing schedule and it was not half as horrible as I had feared. I am writing this as a reminder to myself that I had these thoughts the next time I find myself haunting the web instead of writing. For some reason, I've never been one of those people that can get with the idea of working really hard in order to finish earlier. I will say that one of the motivations I've found is (oh, the geekdom) the new Oxford American Writer's Thesaurus:

This brand new thesaurus from Oxford, the most trusted name in reference, is the first to be developed by writers, for writers. In addition to the more than 300,000 synonyms and 10,000 antonyms found in the thesaurus, each of our distinguished editorial board members (including David Auburn, Michael Dirda, David Lehman, Stephin Merritt, Francine Prose, Zadie Smith, Jean Strouse, David Foster Wallace, and Simon Winchester) has contributed frank, funny, thoughtful, and, most of all, word-wise mini-essays on words that they particularly love, hate, admire, or are just plain puzzled by. Even more helpful for writers in search of the perfect word, this new thesaurus contains nearly two hundred word banks, collections of nouns to add exact detail to your writing. (Was it just bread, or was it chapatti, rye, dal, or pita?) Brand-new word spectrums show where your word falls in a line between two polar opposites (passable is three-quarters of the way from beautiful to ugly).

It really does rock.