How to begin
Now that the sermons have been temporarily dispatched--temporarily, that is, until the editor asks me to cut two thousand-odd words out of the article--I can dive into Book Two, a.k.a. Victorian Reformations. Hooray! But where do I start? (Dad: "Well, you could throw a dart...")
READER, IDLY PASSING BY: Er...the beginning, I presume.
Alas, it's not quite that simple. While I'm not one of the Flying Karamazov Brothers (for starters, the whole gender thing gets in the way), I have to keep several different problems in the air:
1. What have I done already? A version of Chapter One already exists (you can find it in here). I delivered a conference paper related to Chapter Three about a year ago. In all likelihood, the revisions to the first chapter will be one of the last things I'll do, while I'll take on the third chapter fairly early in the game.
2. What will involve the most additional research? The final chapter, which is on the subject I know least about. I'm up on the standard secondary sources; it's the primary texts I need to work on. Again, a chapter to be left until the end.
3. Are there any relevant conferences going on? Yes--in fact, the conference is a roundtable, with chapter-length papers distributed ahead of time. Chapter Three fits the conference's chronological limit-points. Besides the benefits of discussion, I'd also have a built-in deadline.
4. Is there anything that can be excerpted or abridged for publication? For pragmatic reasons, I need to keep articles in the publication pipeline; unless I decide to take a break and write something completely unrelated (which is possible, but not necessarily economical, time-wise), it's simplest to publish a book chapter in article form. It's not good form to do this sort of thing too often, because otherwise you end up with a collection of pre-published articles--and that's not necessarily music to a publisher's ears. (In case you're wondering, 1 1/2 chapters of Book One first appeared in article form.) Since Chapter Three will actually have a canonical author in it, albeit not a canonical work by that author, it's probably a good candidate. (Are we detecting a theme by now?)
5. Do I need to travel anywhere besides California? Doing research in the Los Angeles area is easy on the pocketbook, thanks to the presence of Dad the Emeritus Historian of Graeco-Roman Egypt and Mom the Retired School Administrator; doing research anywhere else takes some careful advance calculations, given the limited amount of $ I can scare up from my college. Many of the novels I would still like to read are in the Sadleir Collection, which simplifies things considerably. In one instance, I think I may be able to get away with requesting a photograph of a letter; the final chapter, though, will require a bit of trekking (possibly to Notre Dame).
6. Will I have time off? I'm applying in September for a sabbatical in Fall '08. That means more concentrated writing time; it may also mean some additional travel time, if I manage to apply successfully for some external grants.
And the winner, it looks like, is...Chapter Three. Back to the Marian persecutions!
(Or, at least, I'll be back to them as soon as the books are out of the boxes. Because the bookcases are still on the road.)