Slow Progress

...but progress nonetheless. Before picking up my nephew at 11 for babysitting duty, I managed to get another 736 words written in the introduction. I'm closing in on having the 5,000 or so words I had figured on for this.

This might turn out to be a book after all.

Writing, With Kids

Over the past couple of days, I've been trying to work under two kinds of pressure: chronological, and family-induced.

The first is obvious: my fellowship year is almost over, classes begin in six weeks (yeep!), and I'm still proofreading, filling in square brackets, and writing an introduction and conclusion. I'm far, far behind, and have precious little time to catch up.

The second bit of pressure is unusual: due to a series of family events and dynamics, I have been called across two time zones to babysit my five year-old nephew for five days. I love him, just like I love my six year-old niece, and he can be a lot of fun, but boy, this is one high-energy kid. He never stops, and he never plays on his own.

Here's the hilarious bit: when I explained to my mom that I'd do this, but mentioned that I'd need to head home right afterwards, and not stay around to visit, because I had to write write write, and that five days was doable, but only just barely, she said, "Well, you know, you can put him down in front of a video for half an hour and write then."

This is not mom's fault – why should she know anything about the writing process? But the idea that I could sit down, immediately start writing, and make some sort of progress knowing that I'd only have 30 minutes? I imagine that there are academic-writer-parents out there who have found a way to do just that, but I suspect that most of them get up at 5:30 a.m., and stay up until past midnight in order to get their work done.

Anyway, I managed to drag myself out of bed early this morning, head to a local coffee shop, and get 525 words of the intro written before I have to run one fun errand (more on that tomorrow!), then pick up my nephew for eight hours of being the world's second-best spinster aunt. Good news: I get to have dinner with my old friend The Lazy Gardener tonight! Whoo hoo!!!

Counting Backwards

You'll notice that my percent-done counter has gone up to 87%? Yeah, well that's because I finally faced facts and changed my projected length from 95,000 to 90,000 words.

Also, I've incorporated the sections from Problem Chapter into two other chapters. I now see that Problem Chapter was never really a chapter at all. My manuscript may be getting shorter by the day, but it's tighter, and it's better.

I'm starting to believe that this may be a book after all.

Pull your head out, buddy.

The other day, New Kid did a great post on the "Pothead Ph.D." thing in the CHE. While I found that piece (the original, not New Kid's reaction) merely irritating, this short piece about academics who take out outside jobs made my blood boil. It's a hand-wringing piece by a dean who worries about things like faculty members who "abuse the flexible work hours that are characteristic of the profession," or even more insidiously, who "engage in enterprises that may sully the "good name” of the institution." [scare quotes are his, btw]

Now if the tone of this article had been something along the lines of "Wow! Our faculty are simultaneously working as adjuncts at other schools, as waitresses, in retail, and as strippers,** when we'd like them to be focusing on their mission here. Let's find out why this is going on, so we can fix the underlying problem," that would have been great. Instead, however, what we get is the tone of one administrator talking to another about those troublesome moonlighting faculty. It doesn't even rise to the level of patronizing, because the author treats the faculty he talks about as problems, rather than people with a problem -- one that he and his fellow administrators might be able to ameliorate, no less.

I have plenty more that I'd like to say on this -- in fact, I'm tempted to take the short piece apart line-by-line -- but I'd be more interested in what others have to say.

**One commenter on this CHE piece commented anonymously from a different IP address because s/he was doing just that.

I can't believe I'm even considering this...

...but I think I'm on the verge of reconceptualizing part of my chapter layout. I've already done this once, about a month ago, combining former chapters 1 and 2 into a single, longer chapter. Now, I'm about 80% convinced that I need to take the new chapter 2 (formerly chapter three) apart, pull the good 8,000 or so words from the two major sections, divide them in half according to topic, and incorporate them into chapters 3 and 5.

Here's why this makes sense: Chapter 2 was always a weak chapter, a grab-bag of stuff that didn't really fit anywhere else. It's also thin on documentation. And since chapter 1 is really a background chapter, chapter 2, with all its flaws, would be the first time that readers would encounter my work with the actual documents. And it's not good that this is the first impression they get.

Here's why I'm hesitant: this will leave me with a four-chapter book (not counting intro and conclusion), with those four chapters only totaling about 75,000 words. Add another 10,000 for the intro & conclusion, and another 4,000 or so for the bibliography, and that feels like barely a book at all. Plus, this seems like awfully late in the game to do a major rearrangement. It's like my version of a Hail Mary pass.

Yet, I'm about 80% sure I'm going to do it anyway.

Disconnecting

I've started seeing Starbucks again.

Starbucks is frighteningly ubiquitous. There's at least one in your town, no matter how small. In some places, you might stand on a single corner and be able to see two. When I lived in Home City, I actually worked for this outfit, and while the beans are a bit overroasted for my taste, the general product is fine, and they were a good company to work for, proof that profit & ethics don't have to be mutually exclusive.

But I make it a general principle to support local businesses, so I rarely go into Starbucks. When they put one in our school library (see photo), I was incensed, for too many reasons to go into. And Fellowship City, Job City, and Home City are all rife with indie shops, so there's no excuse (as there is in an airport or a small town) for not patronizing the locals.

But lately, I've been spending more time in Starbucks, even going out of my way to do so. Why? Because Starbucks is the last coffee shop in the country without free wifi. And like many people, I'm utterly unable to resist the lure of my e-mail account, everyone else's blog, and so many other things. God forbid I'm online and alone, because there's a website that has links to every episode of nearly every TV show you've ever heard of that has become my latest time suck. And on and on. Starbucks provides enforced isolation from all this, like a technological monastery. And I've found that my productivity triples when I can't go online.

So, until I learn some self-control, I'm back.

[In ID news, for those of you who know him and/or are interested, he's arrived in Smallville (pseudonym subject to change without notice) safely, and has unpacked the moving truck. Apropos of this post, he informs me that Smallville allegedly has one Starbucks, but he has yet to figure out where it is, and the nearest one that the company website admits to is 90 minutes away.]

$*%&^%!!!

Step One: Print out old chapter draft.

Step Two: Make notes on old chapter draft, both in margins, to indicate topics, and in text, to edit.

Step Three; Using marginal notes, construct new outline for chapter.

Step Four: Unthinkingly toss out old chapter draft, complete with very helpful text edits. Make sure to do this in a coffee shop, so when you discover your error the next day, there's no way to get the text back.