Entry 136, Wednesday
In the chair. Doing some work on chapter 6 starting now, getting out the paper folder. Feeling tense! Suddenly feeling inadequate again re: what I haven’t read. Living with limitations and finitude is hard. I went through the paper copy of my notes on chapter 6 and my impatience is raging! Three deep breaths. I am making good progress on the book. I am writing the book. It’s happening. All I can do is what I can do, getting amped up about it not being more is a waste of time and energy. Did a bit more writing and note review and thinking for chapter 6. Feels painfully slow. The early, steepest part of the learning-and-making curve. Entry 137, Monday I wrote some on Thursday and Friday at the writing group/workshop meeting, forgot to diary, just dove right in. Again I need to restore my habits and discipline. Today is the first day of classes and I am very distracted, tense and jittery. Again I am very distracted, that the distraction is different doesn’t matter. Going to do 30minutes of work on my book then walk to my office. What am I doing? Need to remember. Going to look at my notes. I worked a while on chapter 6. Once again discovered I don't have the structure right. I feel very impatient. Sigh. I now think what I'd imagined as the penultimate section should be the first section after the intro. I'm going to proceed that way for now, will plan to write what I now think is section two. To do so, I’m going to review the notes for this section and chronologize them as I did previously with the other section. That won’t take long, even if it feels like it will. That should speed up the actual writing. I have to head to my office and shift to teaching prep. I’m going to first document my writing time in my spreadsheet. Entry 138, Tuesday Checked email before writing. STOP DOING THAT. Am at coffee shop now, am going to get out my notes and figure out what to do about chapter six. Worried the chapter sucks. Okay I reviewed my notes on tasks and dove into the work, reviewed my notes for this section of the chapter, I think it will go fine but I *feel* really stressed about it and want to avoid the work instead of dive in, which is counter-productive. Quiet down amygdala, I got this. The work has in fact gone well, worked about 2 hours, got a lot done. Still feeling the same, but not as loudly. Need to remind myself I’m writing the first draft. Okay, onto other responsibilities. Entry 139, Thursday Wrote yesterday, forgot to diary. Wrote today before diarying. Again must change this. Writing went fine. Meeting afterward, lots of email. Sigh. Need to do other work then back to writing. Writing went well enough. I think I’ve cracked chapter 6 enough to write a shitty first draft, will need revisions internally but that’s always the case. I’m excited that the book first draft is nearly done, I’m a bit worried about revising it all. Entry 140, Friday. Did it again. Worked before diary. I need to reset. Bad work day today, took most of day off for Kit’s birthday, try to work in a window, it’s gone badly. Lots of guilt, anxiety, tired from stress insomnia, and have a headache. Blech. Plus side: I outlined the latest subsection of chapter 6. Poco a poco. Entry 141, Monday Two kids sick and it’s labor day but I gotta do the work. Don’t wanna. Gonna. And I’m taking more days off post-tenure, fingers crossed I get it. Entry 142, Tuesday I wrote an ending to chapter six yesterday. Pleased about that. Worked too long, feeling it today, and am short on time because of other responsibilities I didn’t get to. Short work session starting now, going to free write on the point of the book over all to see about starting to think through the conclusion, then list some tasks for the sake of next work session Entry 143, Wednesday Now the baby has a fever and the five year old’s throat hurts. Hopefully the fever’s just a side affect of vaccinations yesterday and the sore throat’s just post nasal drip. My biggest kid was really sick for about a week and I felt really bad for her, really don’t want the littler ones to have to endure that. I feel guilty about leaving for work while the kids are sick, feel guilty for A’s added parental workload and exhaustion. I remember one of the directors of the center I was at in Indiana saying that he became a marathon runner after he got tenure (because then he could say no to more things and make more time available for his health) and lost 50 pounds. He said being pretenure faculty is really bad for your health and the work-life balance is all wrong. It was nice to hear someone senior say it out loud. Nice to think that there’s some more balance possible in the future too, won’t always be like this. And my kids won’t always be so little. I’m on the bus to work, going to the coffee shop first. Plan is coffee and 15-30 minutes of book work then class prep and other responsibilities for the day. I carried my big umbrella today against the rain and getting on the bus all the water on it fell all over my. This is a metaphor for something. I am less wet than I’d be were I umbrella-less though. The wi-fi on the bus isn’t work and I find that irritating but I think it’s really for the best. Bus internet is a bad idea, at least mostly. The next book work: review chapter six diagnostically, review my paper and electronic files for organization and briefly for content and comprehensivity of archiving the bits and scraps and drafts, review my notes for the book’s ending. BAD LAZY TIME Entry 144, Monday. It’s been too many days since I wrote. I wrote an entry on a Wednesday, then the next day wrote my humanities center talk. I binge wrote 4500 words that day and that night - stayed up really late. It was nice doing that, to be honest, for several reasons, but not good for me, also for several reasons. I wrote a tiny bit the next day, Friday, then came down sick over the weekend and remained so for the week. Angelica was sick too, and so was the baby. The big girls had been sick the previous week. It was exhausting, and the lack of sleep from staying up too late didn’t help. I took several days off because I felt too foggy-headed to write, and I had other responsibilities piling up. I did a few minutes of writing here and there over the end of the week as I slowly started to get better and as my family got began to get back on an even keel, but it was a rough week and a slow return. I feel better about it now having typed this out. Am now working on the ending to the book. Got significant headway! Pleased about that. Back at it tomorrow. I printed my to-do list. Entry 145, Tuesday. Still struggling to recreate equilibrium and routine, maybe just create in the first place. Been a challenging couple three weeks. I did some file and note review for the book ending, I should have diaried first! Do what is best! Stop cutting corners! My impatience biting me. I think I might gut chapter 1 when I revise - my own guts knotted as I type that - in response to some feedback I got on it last fall, and turn the interlude plus the remains of that chapter into the new chapter one. Have to think about this. Entry 146, Tuesday again. I’ve been working on my grant proposal. Submitted it late last night. I’m tired today. No options, gotta work. Going to make a plan and get started. Okay I read over my work file. Going to follow the plan and review my notes and raw materials. Entry 147, Wednesday. Didn’t diary before writing, should have. Am now printing out THE FIRST DRAFT OF MY WHOLE BOOK! Very excited. Appending here this thing I wrote to help plan my work: 9-27-18. As I read my manuscript I’m looking for the book-ness of it. What’s the book as a whole? How and what do the parts contribute to the whole? I want to look for specific contributions of each chapter in terms of facts/evidence, narrative/tone/moral content, and conceptual contributions. I want to be sure that the chapters are threaded together, that the pieces tie into a whole. For each chapter, before reading: - what is the book about? - what is the chapter’s part in what the book is about? - what are the conceptual, narratival, and evidentiary contributions of the chapter? - what are the ways in which the chapter sets up (explicitly or implicitly/foreshadowing) later chapters? - what are the threads I want to make sure to draw clearly from this chapter to later chapters? - are there ways I want to loop back here to previous chapters? * as I read, note whatever occurs to me. * after I read each chapter answer those questions again * then reread the notes I took and type them out with my answers to the above questions * then read over the notes I have on feedback from readers so far and see if I want to use any of that too * after I’ve reviewed the whole book manuscript, review all the notes generated by this process, categorize them into types (big ideas, macro-structure/threading between chapters, meso-structure in chapters, need for filling out new prose/gaps, need to finish footnotes etc, micro-structure), then read the categorized notes and prioritize them. Do the high priority (i.e. have to do it before it goes to readers) stuff then send it Entry 148, Wednesday. Many of my writing habits have fallen to pieces, especially the meta-level, the subtrate, like the diary writing. My previous entry was on a wednesday as well but it was well over a week ago, I don’t even remember when. Sigh. An update: I have a revised first draft, with completed footnotes and some degree of re-organization. A friend is reading through it for me doing what I think of as an egregiousness check, finding things I must do before it goes to An Official Reader. I felt let down a lot after I got the thing to that point of completion. I think that’s just the reality of the process for me - I ran hard, I felt worn out the next day. It’s fine, normal, just unpleasant, one of the costs of the exertion. I wrote a bit about this on The Twitter. Since then I have been at something of a loose end. I’ve written two conference paper proposals, and reduced the amount of time spent on writing daily. That reduction was in part a necessity because I’d let other responsibilities stack up somewhat, so the pause while the book is in a reader’s hand is an appropriate time to turn to that material. I do not like being back to the beginnings of things. Then again I have not liked lots of moments in the process of the book writing - that’s part of the point of the diary, to make discomfort not be something according to which I steer myself. I’m writing this at the end of the day instead of the beginning. I should return to this as a practice, re-habituate myself. It feels better to say this stuff, letting it out and whatnot. File under Vent file, Joli Jensen, wisdom of. Good to have written this, despite the less than ideal elements. I should find my copy of Steinbeck’s diary and resume reading it. Tomorrow I will see about writing in the diary first. Also, I updated my writing goals on googledocs.
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