How ironic is this?
I received an award (in the form of a course release from my teaching load this semester) to work on an academic book chapter (and to research and draft an article about a film on which I presented a paper in Venice last fall).
But at the end of this semester? Sure, I completed my book chapter (the volume will be published by Macmillan and come out later this year), but the second item? I have only about 10 (revisable) pages completed, and there’s still a crap-ton of research I need to do until I can rework them and finish the article. (Academic article production is a long and slow process, not to mention meticulous. No one I know can just crank them out in my general area of the humanities and the arts.)
What can I say? I had a lot of service and committee work to do this term — as one does when one is a senior professor — and it all got in the way of regular writing, despite my optimistic (and somewhat unrealistic) expectations.
So now that the semester is winding down and summer awaits (with the caveat that I’m teaching a supervisory course online over the so-called break), I’m reassessing my writing goals for the near and long term — yet again.
The remaining article remains my first priority, if only because I have to submit a report by August 1 on the status of that project.
After that? I’m vacillating.
However, in recent days I’ve found myself wanting to re-focus on romance. Yeah, I know: a lot of people turn up their noses at it, but frankly, that’s a matter of ignorance. It may not be to their tastes, which is fine, but the chances are they’re literary snobs. Genre fiction? Gasp. It’s not *literary* fiction, nonfiction, whatever.
I just kind of roll my eyes at that. I have a B.A. and an M.A. in English and American literature. I get it. And yet I write and publish in different modes: academic, memoir, romance. They’re all so different. One is not “better” than another. They’re simply different beasts.
I continue to reflect, but by June 1 I will have a writing plan in place for that month (I’m traveling during July and part of August) and have made some choices about what and how I plan to write come the 2018-2019 academic year.
And I’ll post it here.
Wordsmith@Work 