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THINGS HAVE CHANGED:

Since I am no longer a professor in the classroom, this blog is changing focus. (I may at some future date change platforms, too, but not yet). I am now (as of May 2019) playing around with the idea of using this blog as a place to talk about the struggles of writing creatively. Those of you who have been following (or dipping in periodically) know that I've already been doing a little of that, but now the change is official. I don't write every day--yet--so I won't post to the blog every day--yet. But please do check in from time to time, if you're interested in this new phase in my life.


Hi! And you are...?

I am interested to see the fluctuation in my readers--but I don't know who is reading the blog, how you found it, and why you find it interesting. I'd love to hear from you! Please feel free to use the "comment" box at the end of any particular post to let me know what brought you to this page--and what keeps you coming back for more (if you do).





Tuesday, March 3, 2015

Quickie

I'm bringing the productive part of the day to a halt a bit early so I can allow myself some time for social activities. I was doing the "sit for 45 minutes, walk for 5" thing--even though it started to feel pretty ridiculous to circle around my rather small apartment over and over--but then the timer went off when I was right in the middle of something, and I thought, "I'll just turn that off, finish what I'm working on, then do my 'walkabout'" (a term my mother uses for pacing around her house), and to absolutely no one's surprise, I then just kept working and rather forgot about the need to get up and move.

Oops. Well, I'm about to take a real walk--you know, like, outdoors--so I'll forgive the lapse. But I do have to keep an eye on that sort of thing.

Still, I whacked through more of the critical stuff today. I'm still resisting the impulse to go back over what I've already done to see if I can edit it down. I have a sneaking suspicion I'm going on too long in some of the annotations, and that--contrary to my pedagogical aims--I may be providing too much for the students instead of encouraging them to dig through the sources themselves. But if I start second-guessing myself now, I'll derail, I suspect. So I'm simply going to keep on keeping on and go at it later with the weed whacker.

One interesting moment today: I glanced at one of the books I have in my own personal library today, and something about it produced an enormous anxiety wave. As far as I could determine, the anxiety was that other people have already done what I'm trying to do and have done it better. Intellectually, I suspect that when I read the bit that triggered the anxiety, I'll discover that it does precisely what I don't want to do: it hands too much to readers and doesn't encourage them to do much on their own.

That's a very fine line to walk, I must say: the line between supportive encouragement and "enabling." My experience in the classroom would suggest that I'm so concerned about the enabling bit that I don't do enough of the supportive encouragement. The nice thing about a written project is that I can keep working on it until it gets closer to striking the balance--or so I hope.

Little else to report today. I'm not sure what I'll work on tomorrow. I may continue to crunch through the critical material, or I may take a real vacation from it and work on the chapter on socio-historical context, or I may tinker around a little more with the chapter on what I'm now calling the "Hainish matrix" instead of the "Hainish universe"--largely because I got a charming reply from Ursula in answer to my question, so not only do I feel I can proceed on that, but I now know better what to say. As always, her reply brought up issues I hadn't even thought of--but for once I can include those issues in what I'm doing instead of wishing madly I could when it's too late. In any event, I don't want to embark on anything that requires me to reread the novel just yet: I want to save that part for last.

Now, however, I am getting myself into my snow gear and heading out into another round of falling flakes, multitasking by having a phone date with a friend while I walk. If only I could read or write and walk at teh same time: taking care of my body and my book would be infinitely easier.

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