I'm a few days away from the first draft of the dissertation. It's not exactly huge by any means, it will be close to 100 pages when all is said; but that's due to the idiotic formatting requirements of the graduate school, double space and all of that. It probably won't be as good as it could be, but considering the limited value of this...My advisor had me spend 4 months on the manuscript, and it's still not good enough for her. In contrast, she gave me 3 weeks to write the entire dissertation. I've been working on it for 6 months though, so by the time those 3 weeks rolled around, I was mostly done. Anyway I have about two weeks to get it in good enough shape to give it to the committee; I have to get a document with all the committee's signatures saying they read it and it was good enough for defending, and that has to be done two weeks before defense. So that needs to happen in mid-November, bare minimum. Defense is Dec 8th. ANyway i'm under the gun, but it's managable; I am not writing every waking moment, more like every other waking moment, or 2 out of 3 moments.