Job season! Wabbit season!

I'm trying to frontload as much of the job market work now, so when the applications start coming due in earnest, most of the heavy lifting is already done. To be honest, I've already sent off two applications (!), and there's a decent batch with a 10/15 deadline--so all of this isn't actually all that in advance.

I did revise my job documents pretty substantially this year, to reflect the changes in my teaching that a result of my Brittain Postdoctoral Fellowship, as well as my new position this year as the Assistant Director of the Writing and Communication Program. While I was making this big push for new materials, I bit the bullet and made myself a website to collect all of my job materials. Rather than relying on Academia.edu, which I've been using for several years now, I decided that I wanted my own dedicated web space that I could fully populate the way that I wanted it. Academia.edu has made changes to their website so that it looks more like Facebook. I wanted the content on my primary web presence to be more clearly organized.

Making the website has been quite a learning experience. Not the actual building--wix.com really is user friendly--but in writing introductory text, revising my teaching philosophy, and considering what to include, I had to do some thinking about how I wanted to frame all of the content. Just coming up with a couple of sentences to put on the landing page for my teaching section--it's quite a writing challenge to come up with two sentences with which to introduce my teaching!

I continue to tweak design, alignment, and other small things, and I need more visual elements on the pages, but in general, I'm pretty pleased with the website. I'm very curious to see how much traffic I get, and how useful it ends up being during this job season.

Post-Summer

Normally, I'd title this something about a new semester or new school year, but this was such an eventful summer, that it more feels as if the newness of fall semester is more an outgrowth of my summer activities, rather than a new chapter.  Despite my intentions to be less busy than I was last summer, there were so many opportunities this summer that I struggled with figuring out which I should pursue and which to let go of.

I think I made good choices.  After a whirlwind tour for my birthday (friends, family, mountains, and spending my birthday covered in bubbles dancing to My Life with the Thrill Kill Cult), I taught a five-week course in Southern Women Writers, did research in the new Dorothy Allison archive at Duke, and spent a week in the redwoods of Santa Cruz, immersed in the Dickens Universe. 

There are way too many stories to tell to even begin telling them here.  However, the end result has been, weirdly enough, that I have adopted a lot of new, incredibly different, weirdly healthy habits after all of these adventures.  Before this summer, I tended to work upstairs, in front of the tv, staying up until two or three in the morning, and sleeping until afternoon if I could.  Since I've been typically teaching after noon, I could sleep as late as eleven on teaching days, even.  I'd go to jazzercise two or three times a week.  I drank three or four diet soft drinks a day, and ate a lot of sweets. 

Some combination of new environments and challenging (yet thoroughly enjoyable) schedules and--what, magic?--has had the end result of completely resetting my habits.  Since I've been home, I think I've slept as late as ten once.  Mostly, I get up between eight and nine, make some cafetierre  (which I think sounds much fancier than "French press") coffee, and start the day working.  I work much better now downstairs with music, rather than upstairs with television.  I have at most one soft drink a day, if that.  I'm working out five times a week.  And the only sweets I have now are part of my bedtime ritual--chamomile tea and two Biscoff cookies, and I'm ready for bed. I've very quickly pavloved myself into feeling sleepy after this nightly ritual.

I've had similar responses to retreat-like experiences in the past--I quit smoking after one, and made the commitment to finish my bachelors and go to graduate school after another.  It's definitely increasing my productivity, which I'm quite pleased with.  And which is a good thing, as the threat of the job market and finding fifth year funding is looming large at the moment--I need all of the productivity I can get!

On Productivity and Inspiration

It's 2:45pm and I'm still wearing my pajamas and dressing gown.  I slept until 11 this morning, and have been working on and off since then; I'll continue until about 3:45, when I'll leave for the library and jazzercise.  It's a very nice break, after a couple of weeks of being full-press on, with a gazillion meetings and a weekend-long exhausting (although quite enjoyable and productive) conference. 

I've read a couple of things recently on productivity and the pressure to be productive.  I definitely take Planned Obsolescence's point that busy-ness and stress are points of pride among many, as well as No Matter. Fail Better's and The Thesis Whisperer's discussions of the usefulness of the #acwrimo month  Like them, I've been less interested in the competitive word count aspect of #acwrimo than in the commitment to writing--as well as the feeling of community that comes with such campaigns.  Such commitment and community are what I most enjoyed from being part of the 14 Day Writing Challenge earlier this month; I'm hoping to continue this with the new writing group I've joined.  Our first meeting was yesterday, and I have high hopes.

What I've gained most from these visible academic writing campaigns was the beginnings of the discipline of daily writing--I've started getting up at 9 during the week and spending the first two hours of the day working.  And although part of this work is answering emails and scheduling things and other non-writing work, the quiet of the morning has also got me writing every day.  While I realize that 9 is not early morning for most people, given that I don't teach until 2:30 in the afternoon this semester, it's grown quite easy for me to adapt to later and later days, not going to sleep until 2 or 3am.  And though I used to think of the work I did at night as productive, I've been a bit surprised to realize that when I get up and work in the morning, I'm much quicker and more efficient in the morning.  I get much more bang for my working buck in the morning, much to my inner 20 year old's chagrin.

So many people I know--my students especially--are so worn out and burnt out right now.  In academia, it's really November that's the cruelest month.  With exams behind me, I'm feeling a bit less stressed than those around me, and I'm trying to use this energy to propel my writing.  To check in for #acwrimo--I finished and presented a conference paper, and I wrote and submitted the first draft of my prospectus.  Next up is an article which I would like to make a 12/1 deadline with, and I've had a conference proposal accepted for the Appalachian Studies conference in March, which I've started making notes for as ideas occur to me.  Word count?  Who knows.  My biggest accomplishment is starting the discipline of writing every day and starting to figure out how I work best--so that when I start dissertating in earnest, I'll already have some traction.

Brief writing update

I sent my conference paper to my writing buddy, who gave me some fantastic feedback.  I'm so fortunate to have some really insightful, smart colleagues to work with.  I've revised based on the questions she asked and the suggestions she made--I still want to tighten up my thesis statement, but it's close to done.  Now to start thinking really hard about my prospectus.  These accountability groups I'm in are really, really helping me stay on task!

Writing Update

I took the afternoon off (as all of the football nonsense in my neighborhood was making it difficult to concentrate anyway) and went to see Cloud Atlas--what a wonderful movie!  Yay for intelligent film-making!

I spent the rest of the evening revising my conference paper in a leisurely fashion.  I started off with 12 pages, and have now got about 9-2/3, which is a good length, I think.  I've sent it off to my writing group buddy, who's offered to read through it for me.  The hard part for me in this paper was (1) trying to say something I haven't really said before, and (2) saying it in the limited space of a conference paper.  It took a lot of organization work--what happens if I put these ideas together like this?  Or maybe this has more in common with this other thing?  I think I finally found an organization that makes sense now, and makes sense in less than ten pages.

I am having so much trouble reading.  It's as though my brain decided that once exams were over, it's not reading anything more challenging than rock star memoir. (I will say that John Taylor's memoir is not disappointing--so good!)  I really would like to regain some reading concentration, though, as I really do need to get through some reading in order to write my prospectus the way I think I should write it.  I read through a friend's prospectus this week--which was fantastic--and I feel like I've got a better idea of what it should look like now.  But I know what I need to read, and what I need to figure out, and my brain is being less than cooperative.

I will say that this 14-day writing challenge website has continued to be helpful.  I'm having to admit that dedicated, concentrated writing time during the day really does get me to accomplish in much less time what it would take me much longer at the end of the day, when I'm used to writing. I sometimes don't realize that I'm actually tired at the end of the day.  Maybe I should try dedicated reading time, too.  Urgh, do I have to admit that the books are right, that scheduling writing and reading time actually works for me?

#AcWriMo Update

I've been participating in the 14 Day Challenge since Monday, and am a bit surprised at how much of a difference it's making.  Committing to writing at least 30 minutes straight has made me aware of just how easily I back off of my writing--I get to a hard place, and will go play a round of Bejeweled Blitz to try to process the block.  Sometimes this works, and after a game I'll have figured whatever it is out.  However, this week during my blocked off writing time I don't back off, and instead push through the block--or if I really don't know, put something in brackets and keep going.  I can feel physically when I'm moving through an uncomfortable part of writing, through a part I'm less sure about, but several times this pushing through has led me to make the connections perhaps sooner than I would have had I gone and had some time sucked online.

I'm still writing in my usual, casual way at night, and that's still a good way for me to get things like revisions done, because they're often boring and pushing through would just be mean.  I am begrudgingly admitting, though, that this scheduled writing is really useful.  I've got seven pages of my prospectus done, and my conference paper is now a full draft--12 pages, which means I've got some cutting to do, but I feel like I'm in  good place to meet my original goals of having both of these things done by next week.  After that, my next #acwrimo goal is to craft an abstract for PCA.  That's a whole new topic that I haven't done before, so that will probably be slower going.

AcWriMo

I have friends who do NaNoWriMo every year, this crazy challenge to write a novel-length manuscript during the month of November.  They have group write-ins, stay up all night, and check in with other crazy writers in order to get encouragement and keep track of their progress.

There are a couple of programs going on right now which are piggy-backing NaNoWriMo in order to stir up similar enthusiasm and encouragement for academic writers.  Because I have a couple of deadlines looming, I've decided to sign up for them.  First up with the National Center for Faculty Development & Diversity's 14 Day Writing Challenge which starts tomorrow.  There, you pledge to write 30-60 minutes a day for the next two weeks.  They have a website set up where you check in every day, report your progress, and encourage your fellow writers.

The second is AcWriMo , which takes a similar all out approach to writing that NaNo does, and encourages accountability and support through their facebook page and twitter hashtag #acwrimo .  I'm not going to set myself a word count for that (at least not yet), but instead am focusing on the daily writing and accomplishment of my two primary goals.

My goals?  11/10 I'm giving a conference paper which is in the beginning tatters stage right now; 11/15 I said I'd have a draft of my dissertation prospectus done.  They're both rather non-negotiable (well, the prospectus date is probably negotiable, but as I set it, I intend to keep it).  I think these are doable goals: one 9 page paper, one 15 page paper--that's something like 6,000 words, which certainly isn't NaNo length, but is a doable challenge.  I also need to write a paper proposal that's due the end of the month.  So, doable goals, but I'm curious to see how the accountability/encouragement process helps.

Meta-Post

I read this article today about blogging at the same time that I have a tab open on my computer to write for a feminist blog.  I still maintain that blogging keeps me productive, as I'm thinking about my work in a lower-stakes environment than more formal places.  Plus, I get a lot from my online interactions--even (especially?) those with people I've never actually met on Twitter or facebook, I've been able to ask for ideas and compare experiences in teaching and grad school.  I've exchanged lesson plans and worksheets.  I've solicited ideas for texts to teach.  My University of Venus blog post got me a guest lecture spot in my department--a poorly attended one, but a good experience and a cv line nonetheless.

That my talk at school was so poorly attended (four people!) may highlight one aspect of online interaction I enjoy--there's an audience!  There's interaction!  As one of my disappointments with my current institution is the lack of face-to-face interaction, having people respond to hashtagged Twitter posts during First Year Comp Chats is nice.  And on facebook, I've been able to "introduce" friends in different places to each other and interact with them all at the same time. 

My other blog is dedicated to my reading list, and I find it a rewarding way to track my progress.  Look at how many posts I made in December!  Maybe I'll get through these lists!  One day!

And I'm sure it's all ultimately vanity-driven, too, but it's good to have an outlet for my words words words.