My Newest Cliché

A couple of months ago, I compared my work on this manuscript to herding cats.

Today, as I reworked yet another unworkable outline for a half-chapter, I shifted to a new cliché: rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

But this time, it'll really be unsinkable. Right?

[ADDENDUM: I went back to search for the "Herding Cats" post so I could link it. Turns out that "a couple of months ago" was actually seven months ago. Over half a year. I was so optimistic then...]

How To Propose

So now that I've committed to sending in a proposal, it's time to whip that thing into shape. In fact, if I can recommend anything I've done with this project as Something I Did Right That Everyone Should Do, it is this: Write your proposal now. As soon as you have a year between you and your dissertation defense, write your book proposal. Yes, it will change a lot between dissertation time and the day you talk to publishers. But this is really the best thing that I did for myself, because it forced me to really think about what I was trying to argue, and why my work was interesting. Since my dissertation honestly lacked a central focus, this gave me a roadmap for moving forward.

At this point, I did two smart things. First, I read William Germano's book. Seriously, pick it up. Second, I sent off the proposal to three people I know who have published a lot, and prepared to take their advice with humility and gratitude. Part of me thought this second bit would be a walk in the park, because a compressed version of the same proposal had already garnered me a load of fellowships this past year. Of course, that's never the case, so here are some of the suggestions I received, which might be helpful to anyone trying to write a book proposal**:

1. Give them what they want. The publisher will have a "for authors" section; do what it says. If it says 2-5 pages, then give them that. If it asks for a table of contents, make sure you include that. If they say, "tell us who the potential audience is," you'd better do that. This means that every proposal you send out will be a little different, even though you may be working from the same template for all of them.

2. Editors are not academics.*** They are business people, in the business of finding potential books that will sell. Show the editor the same thing that will move someone browsing your book at Big Conference Book Display to think "Gosh, I'm gonna buy this one." The book proposal, from what I've been given to understand, probably has more in common with a movie pitch to a Hollywood producer than with a fellowship proposal.

3. Editors are also not your dissertation advisor, expecting you to cite every book ever written on your subject. I spent time crafting a historiographic footnote justifying my book's existence, and a "selected bibliography" to show the breadth of work I had consulted. On the recommendation of one of my readers (who has published over half a dozen books with university presses), I just hit delete.

4. Editors are also not your mom, but it wouldn't hurt to write as if she were the intended audience. Could she read this and get at least a general sense of what your book is about? I don't know about your mom, but mine would have a big problem wading through my first draft's constant references to "discourse" (the same might go for "hermeneutics" or "performativity," if those are your sins). If you use the word "problematize," go stand in the corner for five minutes and think about what you've done, missy.

5. Be interesting quickly. I suck at this. It's why online dating didn't work out for me. Maybe my proposal needs a push-up bra. I'm not sure how I'm going to get there in my own proposal, but I do know that I've got to get it out there in the first paragraph, rather than embrace my own tendency to meander.

6. You are being graded on clarity as well as content. What we tell our students applies to us, too: if you can't communicate your ideas, then what good are they? If an editor has to hack through incomprehensible prose (including my love of parenthetical statements) to understand what your proposal says, they're going to assume that the book is just as dense and incoherent, and thus not worth reviewing. [Fill in your own extended first-date metaphor here, if you choose.] If they give up at the proposal stage, they'll never know.

Any further suggestions from you published authors (or editors!) out there are welcome.

**To be taken with a grain of salt, as I haven't had anything accepted yet.
***Series editors, on the other hand, are academics, so striking a balance is the tricky bit that I'm still working out.

Keeping up appearances

Okay, I'll admit it right now: Three months before my first AHA, I went on a diet-and-exercise program, which I continued pretty much until my second run at the AHA. Because having grown up overweight, I knew that people judge you for these things, no matter how much they may try not to.

Why bring this up? Well, for those of you who haven't seen it, there's an article in the Chronicle about a perennial adjunct who gets Botox injections before her latest round of job interviews. I won't judge the author, who seems ambivalent about ditching a long-held belief ("that women should not turn themselves into time-frozen fantasy objects while men garner value with age") in order to get a job.

Really, though, my question is: when did academia become a glamour profession? It seems to me that there was a time when professors were expected to be a bit dumpy. Sure, there was That One Professor that everyone had a crush on, but that was exceptional. Now, I can log on to RMP and check in to see how many chili peppers they've gotten. I've had a student tell me that at least one other student was ogling me (a perfectly average-looking nearing-middle-aged woman), and seemed taken aback at my response: "I don't want to know that."

I really don't. Because frankly, it's bad enough having to worry about how far behind I am on my writing, whether that article will get published, whether my lectures need to be updated, how I'm ever going to get out of debt, or where on earth I've put the receipts for my recent conference travel, without also having to think about whether the 5-10 pounds I've gained will make people think differently in a professional framework.

I'm just too damn busy for that crap.

An irrevocable step

I've done it.

I've contacted two publishers (out of my list of four) who will be at Kalamazoo, and offered them the proposal and sample chapter(s) by about a week before the conference.

NOW I'm motivated to write. Fear will do it every time.

When research gets personal

First, a quick report: I'm back from a conference in Chicago, which was lovely. I didn't get to play tourist like I had planned (Interesting Development begged off the trip to stay home and write), but I did see a number of interesting papers, and made a couple of good contacts, including some young scholars working in the same field as I, and one senior scholar who has agreed to read my MS. So that's good.

Since returning, I've been reading about various forms of violence perpetrated against women. My route to women's history was a convoluted one, and I'll blog about that at some point, but I think that it's fair to say that those of us working on gender topics, perhaps more so than most, do it out of a sense of personal investment: we want to understand the history of the constructs that in many ways constrain our own experience.

This can be wonderfully enlightening, and even liberating to realize that it's not about you in particular. But it can also be horribly depressing to see the same patterns played out, century after century [NB: yes, I was poking at Bennett's History Matters again -- another thing I'll have to blog about].

Even more unsettling is when you see things you can identify with, either in whole or in part. The shock of recognition can be overwhelming at times: one does not want to feel tears welling up when one is reading at one's perch at a coffee shop table, but sometimes there's nothing one can do about it.

So, in these situations, am I supposed to maintain historical detachment? Does knowledge of a personal connection to my research make me a better historian, or a worse one?

No fooling

I should have posted this yesterday, because that's when I saw it: Behold! The first crocuses!

Spring comes awfully late to Fellowship City.

There's more, but I'm headed off for a conference in about half an hour, so I'll post from there.

Happy April, everybody!

Sex, Gender, and One Angry Medievalist Blogger (NB: mostly non-medieval content)

One of my many research interests is the study of women and gender in the Middle Ages. About half the time I mention this to a non-historian, they often express the conventional perception that women were basically treated like chattel in the Middle Ages. Understandable: I'm sure I do something similar for interesting subjects with which I have only a passing acquaintance. In the field of History, the difference between the expert and the interested amateur sometimes boils down to a self-congratulatory impulse: in this case, the assumption that there is a huge divide between the way that women were treated in the Middle Ages, and the fully human status that women enjoy today. Yay, Us.

Then I read something like this, and I want to scream. Twice. First time, for what happened; second time, for the fact that the local laws appear to be letting them get away with it, at least in part. It's the second bit that brings home that the problem is not just one or two "bad apples," but an entire culture that allows this to happen, or at least quickly turns the other way when it does.

Jesus fucking wept.

[h/t to Twisty at ibtp]