Sunday, November 17, 2013

Another update on Academic Writing Month

At some point this week I despaired of getting anything done, but I managed to get some writing done in some of the in-between times, like when I was on the train in the morning or the afternoon. For instance, I spent some time on the train home on the 13th retranslating a paragraph from a preface that I had only paraphrased before. Having to look at that paragraph more closely in order to translate it gave me some more ideas regarding what to say about that paragraph and the context the preface was creating for the main text. So I got the sense from that exercise that there are useful or productive things that can get done in these small periods of time, like 20 minutes here, 20 minutes there.

I also got some inspiration on Friday afternoon from a monthly writers group that I try to go to. Even though we weren't talking about my writing, hearing and talking to others about their writing gave me a feeling that I was part of an intellectual community; I didn't feel quite so alone working on this as I sometimes feel.

In total, I did about 4 hours of writing this week. (I know that's less than the 5 hours I'm supposed to do, but I'm not going to beat myself up over it.) We'll see how next week goes for writing. I'm making progress, which is better than not getting anything done...

Next update: Next week!

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