Pulling the first tooth

So here I am at 4:30 in the morning trying to finish two papers I want to submit to SODA. The submission deadline is in less than twelve hours. I'm not working this late because I started writing too close to the deadline—I finished writing the technical matrial for both papers days ago. No, what has me stymied is the English leading into the technical bits. At least for me, the hardest part of writing any paper (after getting the results in the first place) is writing the introduction; the hardest part of writing the introduction is writing the first paragraph; and the hardest part of writing the first paragraph is writing the first sentence. Sometimes I think it takes me as long to write the first sentence as the rest of the paper!

Comments

That's heavy-tailed behavior for ya!