Finding participants hasn't been a problem. Access hasn't been a problem. Interviews haven't been a problem. I am accumulating data steadily.

Unfortunately 'steadily' is faster than I'm transcribing and *much* faster than I can analyse it (at least of the formal "sit down and do line-by-line coding variety). The eight interviews I have transcribed – mostly of about one hour each -? have taken three or four hours each to transcribe and generated a total of 62,997 words.

Problem being that I am in an intensive period of fieldwork: I've done five interviews in the last three days and now have around nine hours of interview data to transcribe as well as a meeting observation (likely to be more lengthy to transcribe than an interview due to the number of different participants).

Aaarghh.

There's a deadline approaching fast: I have a supervision next week by which time I need to have made some decisions regarding the next phase of the research design. Mathematically, the chances of fully transcribing and analysing all the interviews I've done before then *and* writing a short paper seem slim to non-existent. Long gone are the days where I can just drop everything, work for 12 hours a day eating cheese toasties (thank goodness). But it does mean that I have some compromises to negotiate over the next few days; the first point during fieldwork where real life encroaches on the perfect, shiny research project in my head.