In Which I Rule (Well, Sort Of)

Well. It's two weeks from my self-imposed deadline on that article, and after much squeezing of blood from stones, etc., I do indeed believe I have finished. I'm not terribly happy with it, but well, at a certain point one needs to just accept that a thing is what it is and hope for the best. Why am I not terribly happy? Let me do this in bulleted form:

• Remember how I'd never intended to do this thing as a full-length article? Well, that leaves me with some lingering insecurity about the structure of it, which I'm still uncertain about.
  
• I think I succeed at that dubious enterprise of both doing way too much and way to little. I think that the basic idea is cool, but I'm not sure I actually am convincing in my articulation of it.
  
• I just hacked 1200 words off the thing (to bring me in under the 10K word maximum), which was probably for the best, given my loquacious tendencies, but who knows if those 1200 words were the right words to cut? Never fear: I've saved the original much more baggy draft.
• I'm just not feeling terribly confident about what I've produced. That said, I'm not certain what else I could do with it to make myself more confident. So what that says to me is that the only thing for it is to do the works cited and to be done with it. Maybe it's good enough to secure a revise and resubmit. That's honestly all I'm hoping for at this point. I really don't think it's terribly good.
  
• Whatever. Not everything that gets published is terribly good, so maybe I'll get lucky. Points in my favor: I'm writing on one author who's sort of hot at the moment, and one of the texts I discuss by that hot author has virtually no criticism on it. (This, of course, could also mean that nobody cares about this text, but I really do think that they should.) Another point in my favor is that I'm making an interesting argument about [period] that I get to through an atypical theoretical approach. Also, I do think that I manage, even when not writing the best stuff, to have an engaging critical voice. While I realize that this isn't what gets a thing published, I do hope it has the power to dazzle and confuse enough to get my foot in the door. Well, and I should also give myself credit for being a good close reader, because I really do think that I do a nice job with that in nearly every case.
  
• Blech. I hate writing.

Except of course I don't or I'd have not thrown myself into this project with such abandon. So clearly there's something about the whole "writing an article" thing that I enjoy, sick though that is. Anyway.

In other news, I also accomplished the following this weekend:

• Big List of Things To Do.
• Edited down an abstract for that fall conference panel.
• Book-related nonsense.
• Much relaxing.
• Read for one of my classes.

Once I get the works cited done, I plan to do some laundry and housecleaning. In addition, I may (gasp!) drag myself to the gym. We shall see, but nobody should get their hopes up about that. You know why I finally was motivated to finish the article? More than anything it's because I want to put away all of the article detritus that litters my living room in messy piles. Nothing more horrible than the House of Writing Anxiety.

So yeah, I'm boring. That's pretty much all my news. Oh, except for that I had an entire telephone conversation in my sleep with somebody on Friday night. Like I answered the phone (apparently on the first ring?), the person chatted for a few minutes, and then I responded with the completely nutty, "I don't know why you continue to subject yourself to people who don't have your best interests at heart" - which incidentally had absolutely nothing to do with what the person was talking about - which tipped the person off that I was UNCONSCIOUS, and only the next day when I glanced at my caller ID did I even realize the person had called (at which time I called for a report on what I said). Now, this isn't my first sleep-talking incident in my life. There was one in college where I apparently woke a friend who was visiting because I sat straight up in bed and said, "No, I am not being uncooperative!" and then laid back down again. There was one in high school where I woke my mom up because I was screaming something about chickens. And yes, as a kid I was both a sleep-walker and a sleep-talker. So this is one of my things. But as far as I know, this was my very first telephone conversation that I conducted entirely in my sleep (though I have previously woken up while already on the phone). Anyway, you know that loquaciousness that I mentioned earlier? Well, apparently I'm chatty even when I'm totally unconscious. This really can cause anxiety, as who knows what I might say if some evil-doer got a hold of me? (An ex used to do this actually - engage me in conversation while I was asleep just to see what I might say. Totally fucked up, that. Oh, and that reminds me of another ex who would wake up because he was talking back to me while I was talking in my sleep. That was weird, though not nearly as creepy as the first ex I mentioned.)