I'm just going to type blindly for a bit to see where this goes. I don't want to work on my other idea just now, and I feel like I should get this done, just to do it. I haven't been reading, of course, so I'm not feeling productive--it's real clear that I need to do some reading every day if I'm going to be able to write. Recently I've been exhausted, so it's hard, but I've got a manageable pile of wonderful books.
Maybe putting women, cannibals, and divorce--or whatever it's called away will help. it's very old new historicism and i'm not convinced I need that right now.
should i switch back to reading about Deloney? I think I might--it'd be nice to get that sort of break from my own thoughts.
i'm worried about my other project because i tried saying it to sarah and she didn't sound interested. that's a silly thing to be motivating this, but there it is. I'm not sure whether I'm worried that th eproject is therefore boring or whether I 'm worried because I cannot explain my ideas such that I get that click of recognition that I'm looking for.
I need click-ideas, psychologically right now. I think it's just a side-effect of how I learned to sell things as a student council person, but that's the kind of thing I'm looking for--an idea that makes people say, "Gee--that's interesting." I have to keep an eye out as a I read for the sorts of things that do that to me, so that I can figure out what it is that works for that purpose in scholarly, as opposed to non-scholarly writing.
i feel a lot better having typed all of this out. it helps me to diagnose my weird mixture of academic-fraud syndrome with i'm-the-best disease.
anyway--i can feel myself about to pile on. books. one entirely worthwhile project for me over the next two days is to come up with a list of the central poets of the periods 1600-1610, 1610-1620, and 1620-1630, and just start reading them. i want to figure out how much i can argue about them, and the best way to do that is to start doing. so i need poet dates, pronto. okay.
in the meantime, i have lots of scanning to do, some sonnet-reading-about to do, and some classic-books to read. so why don't i back away from this idea--it's written down after all, and start on all of that?
i can actually keep a list of writers/books in this space, so I have access to them all the time. it'll help me to build my set of writers. and i can gradually go forward and backwards in time...
OH I have a partial reading list somewhere that I started making! this is a recurrence of earlier feelings of having not read enough. now i can generate a plan, though, and work through everything systematically. And poetry is bite-sized, so I don't have to feel bad about not having much time to read right now.
i'm so glad I did this writing exercise right now--it's actually really helpful. I do worry that I'm training myself to write bad sentences. But, actually, that's not a training I'd mind having--it may make it easier for me to get things on paper so that I can edit them into things that are worthwhile.
I'm just excited that I have this energy to go--do research, and read. I hope that'll help me keep doing the work that I need to do as I move forward. After all, there's a lot of time left, and I need to make meself into an academic.
i started watching the clock, though, so that's no good. i need to start expanding the amount of time, but not such that it begins to feel like a punishment rather than a pleasure.
I'm going to try switching to 11 minutes. I've been doing this for a month, I should be able to write for 11 minutes whenever I want. Next week, I'll think about switching to 12, if I've been able to do enough reading that that feels worthwhile, rather than just an attempt to get myself to keep typing.
Soon, I am going to try to switch my tone to a 3rd person, rather than 1st, though. perhaps. if it gets me rolling...
tomorrow, i want ot talk about my experience reading 10 poems.
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