Writing Scared, Sick and Tired

First thing this morning an email arrived. The final version of my paper has been received and compiled. Whew. Soon I will be excited about going to Paris to present it. Right now I'm exhausted.

Back in January I realised the submission date for the International Workshop on Coding and Cryptography was approaching fast. By the time I'd agreed to submit a paper with my supervisor I had five days to write up my work as a paper. At which time I came down with a viral infection. Thankfully I had the research complete and most of it loosely typed up. Unfortunately it's the words in between the maths, the history and conclusions that I find the hardest of all. Years of practice studying pre-tonsillectomy, lots of determination and a HUGE amount of support from G and Suey meant I made it. My first paper submitted to an International conference.

A few days recovering from the illness were ok but I still had seminar to write and present, a talk to prepare and give and on top of all that a more general theorem to prove. When March 1st came along I found out my paper was accepted! Delighted! There were a lot of corrections to do before final submission though, not surprising given my feverish, analgesic addled state writing it. Finally got it all adapted, edited and typeset perfectly last night, just in the nick of time.

While it is joint work with other authors, I would like to secretly dedicate "Characteristics of Invariant Weights Related to Code Equivalence over Rings" to writing 'even though' scared (even though you're scared you won't be able to do it, scared it won't be good enough, scared you'll make a mess of it, scared you'll miss the deadline), sick (trying to plan your painkillers so you're not too fuzzy-headed to think, or too in pain to concentrate, even though you should be in bed, ignoring how your body feels so you can work) and tired (tired of writing, tired of having to work all the time, tired of being awake for too long) and the amazing magical people that encourage and support us to do it.

Now back to writing the Thesis.