I haven’t mentioned before how symbolic the Essay of Death and Destruction is for me.

I have had good publications before this — Studies in English Literature, the Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies, and a piece very likely forthcoming in a collection from Ashgate soon. The first two were pieces from my MA thesis. The latter is from my dissertation.

In other words, all of those were essays that were shepherded by my (amazing and super-smart) dissertation director. She read and commented on numerous drafts. We met regularly to talk about strengths and weaknesses.

This essay was not. This essay was the first one that was all mine. I began writing it in 2005 in an air conditioned dorm room Ireland and finished it, after rejections from three journals, in the summer of 2009, in my cozy office, after heaps and heaps of revisions and rethinkings and refocusings.

My point is that it’s easy, even despite having a thick skin, to start to wonder if the struggle with the essay said something about my game, and so the acceptance is a much-needed validation.

• • Comments [2]
  • Categories [Writing]

Once, many moons ago, when I used to gladly teach our MA-level research and documentation course, I got beaten up on in an ad hoc meeting because a few folks thought that what I was teaching them was pedantic nonsense.

Around this same time, one of my colleagues was having a good publication run and had the first of two books coming out, and we were in the office chatting about how the publication process was going. He explained that he had just gotten a draft back from the editor and he was expected to make a heap of changes (documentation, etc). He went on to vent that the publisher should have someone in the office in charge of this.

I chuckled to myself because I knew that that’s always a myth, and because that’s what I’d been trying to get across to my MA students: you have to know this stuff, because in the end, you’re the one who will be asked to do all of this.

This all came to mind this week as I get into the manuscript preparation process. Along with my acceptance letter, I received a one-page document explaining what I needed to do to get the mss ready for them: no italics, no bold. Only underline. A space on either side of an em dash. That kind of thing.

The em dash thing was easy enough: find and replace solved that problem.

But I was not looking forward to the italics into underline thing. A 35-page long essay has a lot of italics in it, and this probably has one or two instances per page. Manually converting all of this was going to be real pain, and would take at least an hour.

I write using a word processor called Nisus Writer Pro. I’ve been a beta tester for them for ages now and I’ve gotten chummy with the lead engineer who writes most of the code. I sent him a heap of email asking for help with a few things, then made my way over to the discussion forum where I asked if anyone knew how to make the program find all instances of italics and convert them into underlining.

Turns out it takes about 5 seconds. It took longer to get my jaw up off the floor.

I spent this week printing out a draft a day and poring over it with a highlighter, finding little instances of randomly underlined spaces (the result of my being sloppy about when I told it to stop italicizing), attending to random typos, and generally looking for horribly miniscule errors.

Pedantic stuff.

The electronic version of it went out today. I’ll mail the hard copy tomorrow.

No word yet on the publication schedule. I assume that won’t be settled until the editors get out their pens and tear up my draft.

• • Comments [0]
  • Categories [Writing]

I got comments on the essay of death a few weeks ago. They were excellent. I have rewritten or reorganized the first ten pages and it is much, much stronger now. This week, I’ll work on reshaping the body, cutting the repetitive stuff, and shoring up the conclusion.

I finally feel like I can see the end of the tunnel.

• • Comments [0]
  • Categories [Writing]

As I sit in my slightly-too-warm-office working on yet another round of revisions of the essay of death and destruction, the essay that will destroy me, the essay that I just want out of my life at this point, making revisions in longhand, listening to the Beeb, I envy Flavia.

The essay keeps getting longer when it should be getting shorter. There are sections where the argument feels all muddled.

But as I move through the second half, it seems to feel more solid. Maybe it’s not as bad as I’d thought.

• • Comments [0]
  • Categories [Writing]

Lately I’ve been reading Paula Bartley’s wonderful Prostitution: Prevention and Reform in England, 1860-1914. I wish it had come out before I finished my dissertation, because even if she doesn’t really explain much that I didn’t suss out on my own, he synthesis of all that material and her commentary are both very good. Her bibliography is fantastic, though, and makes me really want to get a job in the UK so I can have ready access to all those archives.

As I’ve been making revisions to an essay, I’m finding again and again that the thing that frustrates me the most about discussions of prostitution in Victorian England is that they are typically so Foucaultian or so Feminist or so Foucaultian/Feminist that they focus almost entirely on the institutions themselves and the power structures within them and which they perpetuated through their efforts.

While I was interested in these structures in my dissertation (and in the two articles I have on this subject), this time I’m less interested in the structures than I am in the narratives that those institutions recorded when they came into contact with these women. That is, I’m interested in their admissions records. I’m interested in their descriptions of their inmates. I’m interested in their descriptions of meetings. I’m interested in the stories that volunteer workers reported about their recruitment efforts.

The last reviewer of the essay noted that I need to beef up my treatment of Françoise Barret-Ducrocq’s Love in the Time of Victoria, which I have been doing; the more I plow through that little book, the more I’m struck by how similar my project is to hers–and to how amazing the material she got access to was. I’m actually more amazed that I’d kind of forgotten about her study, and so when I started looking at it again, I found myself flagging every page for something I could use in the essay.

This essay has been really frustrating to write. It started out as something simple: I wanted to show that the few commentaries on the journal misunderstood what it was about and to show how it records some pretty amazing insights into this movement. But the writing…dear lord. It’s been so much like pulling teeth that when I’m done with it, I want to take a break and write about something completely unrelated for a while. TV. Novels. Contemporary British fiction. Anything but this.

But it’s nearing completion, I think. I had a nice chat with Krista and Jeff (through Krista’s proxy) the other day about some theory that I needed to plug in. The issue is that Foucault leads me down unprofitable directions, but narratology just doesn’t seem quite right if I’m trying to describe how individuals inherit an 18th century moralist narrative that informs their thinking about prostitution and reformamtion–but which doesn’t match with what they find when they get out amongst the women. I think I’m going to try to find some way to make them both work: the narrative results in the institutions which perpetuate the narrative. Something like that. But there’s a kind of Marxist bit of ideology in there as well–that when these workers come up against the real thing, they are attempting to confront that which is unthinkable, and so they just change the subject or force the reality to fit the narrative in some way. Or just plain ignore it all.

• • Comments [1]
  • Categories [Writing]