Balancing Dissertation and Publications

I really need some publications if I'm going on the job market this year. In my mind, I'm seeing this year as a "practice run" because I know that I need publications and to finish my PhD to truly be marketable in my field and get the kind of job I want. Most likely I'm going to be applying for postdocs and jobs this year.

I need to get a couple of pieces out before this month is out. So here are the goals/possibilities--
1) Revise and send out piece on 19th Century rhetor by next Tuesday, August 9th to Major Rhetoric Journal. Turning this into a potential article should involve: 1) strengthen the writing (topic sentences, clarity of arguments, and making the langauge more precise) 2) switching from Chicago to MLA.
2) Revise and send out one of my pieces on an African-American woman politician by Tuesday, August 16th to communication journal that specializes in research on people of color. Submitting to this journal is going to mean switching the style to APA (UGH!!!!) and tightening up the writing.
3) Rewrite co-authored piece on which I am lead author that was sent back from Regional Communication Journal. That is going to involve more research, further analysis, reorganization of arguments (particularly exigence for the study), and once again switching styles (probably APA to MLA). I don't know if I'm ready to do all of that right now. My co-author wants us to jump back into it, but it is going to need a lot of work--I would rather wait until I'm further along on the dissertation.

More than anything, I need to get my work out there. My struggle is that I already know that I am not an article writer--I want to write books. The generic conventions of writing an article do not appeal at all to my writing style or to my personality for that matter. But I need to get some feedback on my work and I need to make contributions to the field and I need to do it because everybody says so. Unfortunately, this means that I have no internal motivation whatsoever to write journal articles. What I love about the idea of writing books is that I am writing because I want to. I got into this whole academic machine to fulfill a goal I've had since I was a child--to write books. So I need to get some articles out, need to finish the diss, so I can go on the job market and put myself in a position to do so.

The plan is to spend one hour each day on publication work and devote the rest of my writing time to the dissertation.