Wednesday, January 30, 2008

In which things are accomplished

First, Citation Machine, you are my new best friend. There was a point this evening when my brain could no longer process basic information, and you saved me.

Second, don't tell anyone, but I wrote an entire conference paper today. And by "wrote," I don't mean I assembled pieces of notes and drafts into a coherent whole. I wrote the whole thing, from scratch, between 1 p.m. and 8:30 p.m. Yes, the ideas had been rattling around my head for the past month or so, and I knew exactly where and what I was doing with the close reading, but every word in the paper was written today. I'm both incredibly proud and utterly shamed. Every time I do this last-minute thing it reinforces that I can do this last-minute thing, and the cycle continues.

The best part of this, though, is this is the first piece of substantial writing I've done since the Bad Time last term. In retrospect, I reacted really badly. I not only fell off the horse, I rolled around in the mud for a while, contracted cholera, dragged myself back to town, and spent the last three months recuperating in a shabby rented room upstairs for the saloon. Or something. But now I have the scaffolding for the first half of the Big Play and Other Big Play chapter, as well as a hook for attaching it to the second play.


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