Writing

Yesterday I renewed my lapsed pledge to write a page of real academic philosophy every day and not blog until I had written that page. Actually, I went a step farther and pledged to have something out to a journal by April 7. No shit. As it happens, Molly started taking work again Monday, which made it even more imperative that keep the children out of her hair and do my part of the housework. All this has made my little world quite hectic. Basically everything that is not writing or childcare has been shoved aside for the past few days.

My writing process has also changed. I’m bracketing more things. I’m more likely to type something like this

…or because the very act of setting aside a “park” makes that stretch of land into an artifact [Cite, something from Coates, or maybe Winner]…

I'm not taking the time to investigate sources. I'm just write

...it was revived in the mid nineteenth century and enjoyed a major resurgence mid twentieth century (Kamala 1997, Carrithers 1983) [Note to self: read enough of these citations to confirm description].

Any problem which might have stalled me in the past is blipped over. I am not worrying about the right way to cite Buddhist scripture or transliterate Sanskrit. Half the time I'm not sure if I am writing a Pali word or a Sanskrit word. I just keep writing.

Interestingly, it is still hard to end the day with a document that is a page longer than it was at the beginning of the day. Most sentences that are added are balanced by sentences deleted. I'm filling in an outline, so when I write three lines of text, it merely replaces three lines that previously read "Heading/subheading/subheading." I only allowed myself to blog right now because at the end of the day I cut 250 words from my blog, pasted them into my document, and promised myself to work them coherently into the text later. (In my paper I want to talk about this sutta, which I blogged here, because it has weirdly contrasting nature imagery, in addition to having a woman gouge her eye out.)

I'm liking this process. The ungraded tests are piling up. My email inbox, which was empty just last week, is now full of things I need to reply to. I was supposed to be home nine minutes ago. But I'm writing. I'm going to get something out there. I'm not going to do what I did last summer, where I started to research, read a bunch of books, and came up with a hundred pages of notes but no essay that can go to a journal. I'm writing.