Writing for the summer

I've been having some computer trouble over the last week, and I finally resolved it two nights ago.  (Being in Research Country means that I have to stay up very late to call anyone in the US, including Apple Support.)  This meant, among other things, that I had expanding internet access, since my computer no longer overheated after an hour of use.  Predictably, I logged on to the internet yesterday morning and glutted on it all day, and got no work done.  It was pathetic.

Today, I sat down at the machine this morning, mindful of my debauchery yesterday, and avoided my USB modem for several hours.  Added 4,000 words to my book manuscript.  Vive la différence.

In a way, I'm still procrastinating on the hard work: those new words mostly came from bits I've carved out of my dissertation, and some stuff that came straight out of my field notes and has never been shown to others before.  So basically, a bunch of cut-and-pasted stuff.  It's perfectly useful material, but I am keenly aware that I have not written anything new for a while now.  That situation must come to an end.

I'm optimistic that this is going somewhere good, though.  I combined two of my hypothesized chapters yesterday, which left me with only four chapters on my outline, and even I have to admit that that's really too short and looks unprofessional within my discipline.  This morning, while forcing myself to confront the beast without hiding behind distractions, I brainstormed a new chapter that could fit in nicely with the other material.  Thus, the cut-and-pastes: I haven't written about this stuff before in large measure, so I had to go back to my primary source data and see what was there.  The new stuff, as I hope, will be particularly appropriate (and attractive to publishers!) in coordination with the epilogue I need to draft to account for all of the recent developments coming out of this year's sociopolitical earthquake.

Oh, and since I haven't yet accounted for myself this week for the summertime writing workshop on my own blog, I'll own up: I did basically fuck-all in terms of the article that I said I would write with the workshop's help.  As I rationalized reported to the workshop on Notorious Ph.D.'s blog, I thought a little about it on paper: I often sketch out theoretical ideas as well as report events in my field notes (doesn't everyone?), and I've been trying to wrap my brain around some of the broader aspects of the stuff the article will be on.  I've been dawdling about putting all of this stuff in one big document, for reasons only the gods of writing and procrastination could possibly explain.  Now that I've put in two hours of development on my book today, perhaps I'll feel up to doing what I told the workshop I'd do, so I don't embarrass myself in front of dozens of blogging peers.