the game

This academic game is odd. There are many reasons I can think of ... cept I can't quite be bothered at this stage to write about them.

CD sounds like she's doing better with the current situation. She's a top chick and I hope she's happy.

Ilana and I have been trying to hack out a decent chapter draft for 'The Handbook of New Literacies' and it seems to be coming along. Ilana spent last week pulling together a whole bunch of stuff and then gave the bones (well more than bones actually) to me for my effort (this was on Tuesday). So I have spent at least half this week refining, reworking and adding things. Not that I can say that my time is always directly focussed on the writing. In the past I have found it useful to disconnect myself (i.e. the laptop) from the LAN so that I'm not distracted by random email or avoid randomly browsing wikipedia. I mean my problem is I'll try to sit there all day plugging away at some small problem (linking one para to another or reworking some sequence of sentences or some other such silly thing) that should be relatively straight forward, thereby making it 10 times more painful and time consuming than it ought to be. An hour goes by and I'm still transfixed on the same 'page' (screen ... you know what I mean). Sometimes I have some lunch, or promise myself I'll go for a walk and grap a drink or something. Today I bought a book (2nd hand - Richard Teese (2000) Academic Success and Social Power. Melb: MUP) to assuage some of the guilt that had built up at not getting more done. It's silly really, because I know that I'd only be satisfied if I actually finished the whole thing in an afternoon.

I do enjoy some aspects of this type of writing and the co-writing aspect is usually always better than doing something by yourself, but it can also be much harder. We have talked about the issues and tried to frame the work over the last couple of months, along with doing plenty of reading and thinking individually. Ilana cut the first basic text, and now I'm recutting the next iteration. Next Wednesday I'll hand it back for her to have another bash at, and then we'll to and fro it more regularly till we're happy (or over it completely).

This weekend Ilana is beginning the other chapter. This one is for an Arts Handbook for Kluwer (I don't know the name) that has more of a technology and LITERATURE feel. So next Wednesday we'll actually swap chapters and I'll have a go at that one too.

Perhaps in a couple of weeks I can get back to the PhD proposal and some serious reading?

Perhaps I should go into work tomorrow (Saturday) to get some more work done? Not sure about that ... I'll sleep on it.

Emma is out tonight doing some IPL practice. So Austen and I went to visit Uncles and Aunts and Grandma and Grandpa (they all live in the same house!) He has been teething lately so he's not the usual happy little chap.

later