Almost there...

Check back at 5 p.m. EST for an important update.

I'm looking forward to...

...sleep.

That's really about it. I arrived in the conference city Friday night, after getting 6 hours of sleep the previous night. Then, because of the time shift, I had trouble sleeping, and had a wake-up call after only 4 1/2 hours.

Then, after 5 cups of coffee and one of black tea, and a too-big lunch, I delivered my paper. I've been told it went well, but I honestly have no way of judging, since I gave it while severely sleep-deprived. I ended up ducking out halfway through the final panel of the day (not mine) because I needed to be up and walking in order to stave off sleep. Caffeine works as liquid sleep for only so long.

I am exhausted, and will be hitting the hay before 9 p.m. local time, if all goes well.

There is still one more deadline to meet, Monday, but I'm sure I can do it. Then another week of classes, then I sleep for all of Thanksgiving week, if I can manage it. I've earned it.

Turning Point

This past week, I got through a week of epic grading: 30 midterms and a dozen ten-page papers. Also, a couple last revisions on the conference paper and a meeting or three.

Now, I leave for a conference to present my first-ever post-book new-project paper. On the plane with me will be:

• My book MS, with revisions, to go over on the plane so I can get it back Monday (5 days past deadline)
• A paper that my friend from Exotic Research City asked me to go over and correct the English
• A grant proposal that a colleague has asked me to give a once-over
• Two thesis chapters from my pokiest grad student

Oh yeah -- and my camera.

By the time I get through Monday night, my major deadlines will all have been passed, and I'll be able to be a bit more relaxed. See you then.

Glory Hallelujah

Last night, around a half past midnight, three minutes after I had turned off the computer for the night (isn't that always the way?), it suddenly hit me** how I could make my conference paper not suck.

Twenty minutes ago, I finished a revision of said paper. It's not going to change anybody's world, but I'm now fairly certain that I will not embarrass myself or Esteemed Adviser at the upcoming conference.

((sigh of relief))


**I know that good writers avoid the passive voice like the plague. But I just can't bring myself to claim agency in these late-night inspirations. They happen to me.

Reader Poll: How careful are you?

I'm going back and triple-checking my footnotes right now. I've prioritized: first, archival document citations (on line now! hooray!); second, published primary sources; third, page numbers in secondary sources (I have much of this on my computer)... or as many as I have time for before deadline. In other words, I'm shooting for sending this off with a final check of 100% of my primary source citations, and likely about 75% of my secondary sources. I feel guilty about that remaining 25%, and glad I'm at least semi-anonymous.

So, since this is incredibly dull, tedious work, and I'm likely to be at it for the next week, more or less, I thought I'd find whatever amusement value in it I could by conducting an unscientific poll of my readers. If you participate, I'd like you to (just this once) log in anonymously. Then answer as many of the questions below as you feel like:

1. When you're doing your editing before publication, how meticulous are you in checking your citations (and does this vary by publication type)?

2. Have you ever caught a citation blunder of yours in print? Did it really, really bother you? Or did you just shrug ruefully and move on?

3. (for comparison purposes): Have you published one book? Multiple books? Articles only?

4. Have you found that your approach to this part of the process has changed over time? If so, how?

Argument-Driven

Thanks for the encouraging comments on the last post. I don't disagree with the fun of setting off into uncharted territory; my problem is with having to then draw a map of that territory that other people will judge.

But that's not the point of this post. The point of this post is that last night, I think I figured out why I'm struggling with this conference paper when papers used to kind of flow out of me while working on the dissertation. I have, in the process of revising the dissertation into a book, become argument-driven.

This is one of the key distinctions between the dissertation and the book, and one that everyone has to discover for themselves as they go along. For me, the moment came when I was writing fellowship proposals in the summer between my second and third year on the tenure track. I was forced to confront the question: So what? In other words, what's the point of all this blah-blah? The grant-writing process, for me, was mostly the process of inventing, nearly from scratch, an analytical framework that the dissertation generally lacked. The pre-submission revision process was me turning the dissertation inside-out, in order to make the argument, not the documents, the main point.

But here's the problem: once you've crossed that line, whether that's in graduate school or (as in my case) much later, you can't go back. You can no longer feel comfortable presenting a paper or writing an article that's just a bunch of neat stories, with a loose "argument" tacked on as an afterthought. The argument has to be the point. And this paper is my first try at constructing an all-new argument. Gah.

The Perils of New Projects

I've been absent from blogging for a couple of weeks now, because I've been wrestling with a conference paper, and I'm always hesitant to blog about such things, which are often less interesting. After all, all academics have to write these papers, and the fact that some go less smoothly than others is hardly blog-worthy. But I've finally decided that my experience with this paper is paradigmatic of a larger struggle: getting going on a new project.

It looks like the book is going to be out next spring, which means that it will see the light about 11 years after I began working on it in earnest, as a dissertation. during about 8 of those 11 years, I was able to peel of parts to present at conferences. The first ones were document-driven, rather than argument-driven, and I felt that I was fumbling around for a point to these papers. But by the end of that time, I felt pretty confident about what the larger message was, and how to frame a smaller part of that message in 10 pages or so.

And what's my reward for finishing a big ol' book? That's right: I get to fumble around again, and wonder if my paper makes any sense, and wonder if my audience will be able to tell that at this beginning stage, I don't really know what my argument is. What I've got instead is a bunch of vaguely interesting documents that I'm imposing a place-holder argument on while waiting for the real pattern to emerge.

So, here we go. I'm confronting my own ignorance again. And desperately hoping not to make an ass of myself.