A fantastic Easter holiday, wherein I have finished all the marking before the break, so I have nothing to do but work on my own stuff. I have managed to finish (or at least, send off) the article I was working on, so the aim for this break is to put together a really interesting post-doc project, which will blow the minds of the people offering the post-doc, so they won’t care that I don’t have anything concrete on my publications list. Really not possible, but this is, once again, too good a post-doc, in just the right field and global location, not to try.

Also on the list of things to do in the next few months: write up a book proposal (which should tie-in with the post-doc project), and try to salvage another chapter for article-revision. If I have more things out there, something might get published, one day…

(And in other news, I’m working on a couple of Victorian/Edwardian walking-skirts for winter.)

I have one more week to finish writing this article. This is not good, considering I have a fair bit of writing to do, and more reading of secondary material. However, I will be stuck at home on Monday, so I’m planning on making a big push then. I also have about 60 papers to mark before Wednesday – but they’re only meant to be about 300 words.* Why is everything always due at once? Oh, wait, that’s life. Current word count: 3,386. Aiming for: 5,000. Really shouldn’t be hard!

*I do know that one of the students wrote about 1,000 words. I’m not sure quite how to deal with this. Can you punish people for writing too many words? Given my problem with writing enough words, I’m not sure.

I survived teaching Japanese school girls over the Christmas/summer break, and now University is back up and running. I’m so relieved not to be teaching ESL – you can’t imagine. I love teaching, and I love the range of students you get with English language stuff, but the topics are SOOOOOOO boring!

So, now it’s straight back into the English department, and I’m not sure how much better this semester’s teaching is going to be than ESL. I’m tutoring (TA-ing) the basic paper on critical reading and writing. The articles which the students have to read and discuss range from the banal to the boring, with a few interesting things thrown in. And many of the writing issues we’ll be dealing with will involve teaching native speakers about how their language works, and what is and isn’t allowed in academic contexts (a point which I think I might be more conservative on than the convenor of the paper). When I last taught this course, I swore I’d never do it again, but that time I had a ridiculous load, as I was supporting my husband through the end of his PhD, and I didn’t understand the point of the paper. I think I have a much better idea about the paper’s purpose, and will be starting to introduce things like ‘What is a sentence?’ from the beginning. The lecturer is better, too, though that’s not hard.

Teaching is also only going to occupy Wednesdays and Fridays, so I should be getting a whole ton of writing done on Mondays and Thursdays, with a fair bit on Tuesdays as well (though much of Tuesday will be spent sorting things for the following week). Maybe, by the end of this year, I’ll have something published? I really need to use this semester to get more written, because I’m getting no replies to job applications. I know I’m really fortunate with the teaching load – it’s light, but pays well enough that I don’t have to go looking for other stuff this semester.

Goal for the coming week: Finish editing the articles for the book/journal, so I can discuss them with my fellow editors next week.

Okay, so last week didn’t end up being much better -writing wise. Put it aside, and move on.

This week, the focus is on getting the rest of my notes written up into full sentences. Then, when I get back to uni next week, and get library access again, I can start some of the secondary research. I suppose I also have to finish reading a rather annoying book, as well. That can be next week’s problem.

This was not the news I wanted to hear. I emailed the place I most recently applied to, to ask if they had received my application, as I had not had any response. It turns out that my application had got through, but when they had transferred info to their database, an ‘n’ had been left off my name, so the email they sent out went to someone else (who apparently has an email, because it didn’t bounce). So, hopefully this university will be able to communicate with me now, but who knows how many emails from universities I’ve missed, because of either auto-correct (Word hates my name!) or mistakes in transcription. It’s too late to contact most of the other universities – they’ve gone on to campus-interviews. I feel sick to my stomach. I’ve been trying sooooo hard this year, and now my name may be the cause of this great, booming silence.

Right, this is a new week.  I did some good work last Tuesday, which means I know I _can_ do it.  Time to get off my rear-end, and work on writing.  My goal for this week, on Dame Eleanor Hull’s writing group, is to write for an hour a day.  This is so very possible, so there is no excuse.  And by blogging this, hopefully I’ll be even more motivated to write.

I have all the notes taken for a close reading of a particular saint’s life.  This means that my current writing is pretty straight-forward – I just have to form it all into sentences, which make my point about communities. At some point, presumably when the semester starts back up, I’ll go and get some more secondary material.  That’s in a couple of weeks, by which time, all the notes should be written.  There, not too much to ask.

I got an email on Tuesday, saying that my article* was provisionally accepted to a journal.  This is great!  Not only is it a bit of an upper, after repeated downers,** but it also gives me the dead-line which I so desperately need to get writing.  I’ve been throwing ideas around, taking notes, dabbling in writing, but not had any real dragon-breathing-down-my-neck reason to write.***  The news that this article needs to be finished by the 25th of March lead to 1,000 words being written on Tuesday, and more have followed.  This will work.  It had better, because I currently am still waiting to hear back from the other journal, which promised a fast turn-around.

*We’ll call this one “Saints and Communities”.

**Not even getting responses to job-applications is pretty rough, especially when the job wiki shows other people’s applications at least being acknowledged.

***I’m not sure why ‘publish or perish’ isn’t enough, but I REALLY need dates, deadlines, etc.  Even if I then let them slide, the bulk of the work will have been done.

So, how does one write articles?  Presumably, you need a job, and so you write articles to get published, so that people recognise your name, so that when you apply for jobs, you know who they are.  This is me, trying to get some sort of impetus to write.

In case you’re wondering, I write about saints.  Anglo-Saxon saints in particular, though I think I will be researching Saint Katherine of Siena sometime soon.  I’m trying to find an academic job, in Old and Middle English, or really anything medieval.  So, if you need a medievalist, drop me a line!