Oof, so you understand the pain. It's so nice to be able to take what you love and write about it creatively without the culture of "publish or perish" breathing down your neck. I suppose the lesson I had to learn over time was that there's no such thing as a "perfect" research paper, so take the critiques as far as you can and learn to put a project away once you've hit that point of exhaustion.

I'm sure you get this question all the time at cocktail parties, but do you have a dissertation topic, and if so, what's it about? (Feel free to give the obligatory 1-2 sentence answer that I'm sure you've been honing.)