the morning light is making my eyes hurt; my fingers are curled as if hovering over the home keys; my back is hunched; my knees crack when straightened; my throat is dry, but i can't be bothered to get up to remedy that. it has been a long night. who would have thought putting words on paper, or text on screen could be so painful/stakingly slow? i am surrounded, under siege, drowning under the piles of interview transcripts, the scrawled fieldnotes on transient scraps of paper, newspaper cuttings, photos, smses, printed emails and google-chats, fine looking secondary texts, photocopied articles, brainstorming, audio files, good intentions, past regrets and multitudes of used coffee cups. Why was it that qualitative empirical work sounded so appealing at the start of this twisting/ed road? Why don't they tell you about the monster you will create and ultimately be unable to control - where was the textbook warning about this morass of data that has literally and figuratively crowded you out of your own head? And while you're at it, try to work iteratively, moving constantly between data and theory; your own positioning and the context of that particular conversation - thinking about representation and style and the "bloody so-what" (thank you Dr. F) of what you're on about. When you have finished, start all over again. How many times can you read the same transcript and still come out with something you never saw before? I will tell you how many - it is exactly the number of times you read it, as shifted ever so slightly by something you read the day before, by what a professor said in a seminar, by a sign you sawposted on a lampost, by what you ate for breakfast. yes, i am referring to subjectivity. How do we do this thing called rigourous qualitative work when it is such a messy, personal, coffee-stained business? I have no answers, at the end of my latest 24 hour stint of 'writing up' - perhaps i am even more uncertain than i was at the beginning of it. All i know is you keep going back for more, more of the same exhausting, multi-tasking, anarchic business, until it is done. Or is it ever?