Clean Up Day

Saturdays--good for laundry, cleaning, and organization, oh and Christmas tree decoration. It was one of those Saturdays for me.

I hadn't anticipated finishing that chapter yesterday so today was a regrouping and goal setting day. I spent some time looking over the draft I have so far for Chapter Four. It needs at least 20 more pages of analysis and a LOT of rewriting--especially since I am adding an additional text to the analysis. So if I work on 2 new pages and 1 page of revising a day, I should be in good shape to get this next chapter out to the advisors before they go away for break. I did a good bit of work today updating my references and looking for new sources. I definitely need to make a library trip this week to check out that reference book I used before. I need some more references/news reports from the 70s on my subject.

Also, now that I have my life freed from the job search, I want to get back to my publication goals. I have a great paper from an English seminar that I would love to get published. It's not exactly in my area but I think it was one of the best pieces I wrote during graduate school. I wrote it in 2003 so I spent some time today researching the novel to see what had been written on it lately. Two pieces have come out since I wrote my seminar paper, one of which begins to touch on some of the issues of genre I discuss in my paper. But I think I can incorporate that and use it as a perspective to "continue the conversation" on this particular text. Perhaps the editors will disagree, but I won't know until I send it out, right? So I'm going to read the two new articles in more detail tonight before I go to bed, figure out how to incorporate them, and then start the work of revising this piece to send out by the New Year.

Other than that, today has been a good day to relax and watch football. I was glad to see Georgia win the SEC title. But I'm a little disappointed by the USC/Texas hype--I'm not sure if either of those teams would be so great if they were in stronger conferences. Now don't get me wrong, Reggie Bush is PHENOMENAL but I mean really--should you win CHAMPIONSHIP games with 60+ point margins? Just sayin--doesn't seem right....Off to watch Florida State finish off Virginia Tech and read these articles before bed.