Surely adapting a chapter for a conference presentation is easy? (Answer: no.)

There is nothing more tempting (OK, there are many things more tempting, but bear with me) for a harried academic, of any age or rank, than to turn a book chapter, dissertation chapter, or article into a conference presentation.  It exists! The research has been done! Just wave a magic wand--or cursor--and presto! Insta-conference paper.  Of course, as everyone who has ever been present for such conference papers can attest, the result is as likely to be insta-disaster than otherwise, especially when the speaker has not quite been able to trim their work to the necessary ten pages/twenty minutes, or perhaps hasn't even tried to trim it.  (Cue rapid shuffling as the speaker discards multiple pages over the course of the talk, leaving paper fluttering about in their determined but desperate wake.)  Worse still, academic prose written to be read is not at all the same as academic prose written to be heard, as becomes all too apparent when listening to a speaker losing themselves in the labyrinths of their ten-line sentences.  

And so, I'm...adapting a chapter for a conference presentation.  Presumably, this is a sign that I like to live dangerously (to the extent that academics live dangerously).  The chapter, from Book 3 1/2, is about the weird history of the term "religious novel" in the first half of the nineteenth century (short version: no agreement about "religious," "novel," or "religious novel").  I cannot "do" the chapter in twenty minutes, because the chapter is forty pages long.  I cannot "do" the chapter's full argument, because, well, the full argument is as long as the chapter.  (Or so one would hope, because otherwise, the chapter has no business being forty pages long.)    The conference paper therefore has to be about one thread of the argument; moreover, it has to be about one thread of the argument during a more limited chronological period, as the chapter covers about five decades or so.  In addition, one of the most difficult aspects of doing this kind of reduction (which, one hopes, will not become a reductio ad absurdum) is that I have to toss most of the evidence and keep only a handful of truly punchy quotations.  This is always a sad process when working with book reviews, because nineteenth-century reviewers could certainly bring the entertaining snark, and religious fiction definitely brought out the big snark guns amongst a certain segment of the reviewing population.  Powerpoint can come in handy at this juncture ("here, look at this quotation while I keep presenting"), but does nothing to eliminate the need for an editorial axe.