Hi all,

Classes start tomorrow, and I'm meditating a lot on my work habits and goals for the next two years once the book manuscript is off my plate.

Among these, I'm really excited for my teaching this semester. I'm trying out new things in both classes, including starting the transformation of my Dramaturgy class (mapping out the large final project over the whole year rather than a single semester; a greater variety of weekly research and writing projects). Larger changes will come next summer, but it'll be nice to start this adventure (more on this in future posts).

I did the revisions to Mountfort/Oldfield chapter this week and have gotten comments back on Siddons that I'll try to start on Thursday/Friday.

My progress on Cibber/Bellamy has been slower than I hoped (are you surprised? I'm not). As was also the case with Siddons, I have a lot of material and am trying to resist the urge to write more until I'm very clear on how I want this to fit into the arc that has been emerging in the revisions to the chapters before (Mountfort/Oldfield) and after (Siddons). To that end, I've been doing some "looping" exercises (yep, the ones you might have done as a little kid), where you free write on the same topic several times to try and refine your thinking. It's good because it gets my urge to write out, but not in a form that I feel needs to be book worthy.

At the moment, I'm steeling myself to be away from the project for most of the next three days as I launch the semester by making a plan for what I can productively do in a limited amount of time each day. Looping is good for this, as you tend to write in 5-10 minute chunks.

Looping is what I came to a few weeks ago when I tried to draw my chapter. The "drawing" ended up looking like I was hunting a serial killer (hey there, murderinos). Actual footage:

That was fun, but I wasn't sure what to do with it after I'd mapped a bunch of connections. I ended up free writing around the clusters I'd made, which let me think through them again, which prompted me to find additional useful congruencies. Looping back through that a couple of times helped me figure out what I'd absorbed about the reading I'd done, what questions I still had, and gave me a place to develop and refine the thesis statements.

Here we go people. It's going to be hectic and difficult the next few weeks. I appreciate the continued support!