Today was a bit of an off day. Unlike my usual routine, I did not try to write early in the morning. I got distracted with Sunday morning life things and then wasted bunches of time on the internet, which gave me pretty vicious eye strain. Before I sat down for dinner, though, I did put in my hour of writing.
First: I keyed in a bunch of changes that I had already written on the hard copy of the proposal and did manage to cut some words.
Second: I stumbled across some old text about the project’s relationship to current criticism, which I had completely forgotten I had written. I like the language, so that is a good find. I am finding that section hard to write. First, I somewhat address it (though I don’t think well) in both the Overview and Abstract sections. Second, I’m not sure how to write about it without seeming to faun over or disparage other works. I want to just write a list of related works and say: my book is like these other ones. But different! I don’t think that’s what presses are interested in, but I think that’s in fact what I’ve basically written in sentence form. Then, I have a much longer paragraph about how my project uses historically grounded terms, rather than ones taken from contemporary discourse and displaced onto an earlier time period. But I worry that this is over-inflating the quality of my project. Harumph.
Goal for today: one hour; keep reducing words.
Goal accomplished? Yes (but just barely)
Current word count: 3,613 (this is making me happy)
Goal for tomorrow: Put in 3 hours of writing. Clean up transitions in proposal and beef up some of the weaker sections, esp Rationale, Audience, and Relation to Criticism. Tighten Abstract. For a different project, I need to put together a short application for a pedagogy conference.
