Sabbatical Reflections

Even on a three-three load, it is perfectly possible to do a fair amount of writing during the school year.  But.  That writing tends not to happen on teaching days, when the cumulative effect of performing in front of students reduces my intellectual aspirations to the level of playing Nethack, or maybe watching the now-departed CSI.  And it generally happens between other things: prepping for classes; office hours; attending faculty senate, department meetings, committee meetings, &c.; household chores; etc. etc. etc.  (Anyone with additional family responsibilities has another layer of obligations.)  The flip side of having a semester off from teaching, ironically enough, is that it becomes much more necessary to think actively about scheduling.  Next semester, when I have non-book-related writing obligations, my writing plans will all be made for me, as it were: I can write on the days I'm not teaching, after I've completed my course prep, grading, and other responsibilities.  The sabbatical, by contrast, requires self-starting.

Fortunately, I seem to have started myself: I've completed the first of the two chapters I promised to write when I applied for the sabbatical, and don't see any issues with finishing the second before the semester is finished.  (Insert knocking on wood here.) At this point, I'm slightly ahead of schedule, which gives me time to do some additional reading before I begin writing again, sometime around the middle of this month.  This chapter solved a structural problem about a chapter that I'd already been working on--namely, that it needs to be two chapters.  (Having identified where the chapter needs to split, I'll probably do some more revisions there before I move on to the new chapter.)  The drafted chapter also helped me work through some of the themes for the overall project, which is a Big Book (a Really Big Book) but not one organized by denomination, as has been the traditional approach.  (We've got those already;  nobody needs me to do another one.)  In any event, in terms of the book's general progress, my work on it this semester will probably be it for the school year, as I have two articles to write (one due in the summer, one in the fall) and, possibly, a conference paper or two.  Depending on how the second article progresses, I should get back to the book during the summer.  Last but not least, I've got another article kicking around with Major Structural Problems, some of which I've fixed, but not all; I've committed myself to an upcoming workshop this month, so I may schlep it there to get some more feedback.