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Absolutely everything urgent today takes close attention, and all the non-urgent work doesn't. This means I'm working a bit here and a bit there, taking lots of breaks. It's very frustrating. Normally the same pile of papers that today will take the whole day would take just three hours to work through. It's only three hours paid work, but I can't afford to let my eyes get lazy and stop looking and I can't afford the brain switching off and stopping thinking. I also have to be careful with the eyes. It's barely a year since I lost that chunk of vision. So I'm being careful, and working in chunks and noting it all down, so I know how long it all takes, over a day.

Anyhow, by tonight, all the close detail stuff will be done (for now) and I shall have two reviews to write and 6,000 words of my own fiction, and that will take me right through to Saturday. OK, so there's other stuff as well - there's always other stuff as well - but I have novel to write. When those 6,000 words are written, then things get really exciting. I will be able to sort out the next tranch of research. I love research zone almost as much as I love writing zone. The timing is important, though. I need to be able to do the research when I teach, since writing fiction and teaching take much the same energies.

None of this is terribly interesting to people other than me. The work I'm editing is fascinating, and the interview I just finished for BiblioBuffet is cool, but the processes of working on them are not exciting to talk about. That's my life today, though, that and midsummer.

It really looks as if you're stuck with the unexciting side of my life until I move out of editing mode. It's not that there aren't curiosities involved. Yesterday, for instance, I forgot to blog about mischlings and pirates. It's just that I have work that pushes the bloggable curiosities aside.

(no subject)

Remember my admonition not to get your face put on a postage stamp? Well, it was directly linked to the piece I was editing that day and that piece has now gone up. Please beware that it contains interesting language. The title does, anyhow, the rest is benign and is basically two writers helping me think about women's history.

Which reminds me, only a month until my Women's History Month ginormous celebration!

And now I must go back to my commas and dashes and occasional ellipses...

(no subject)

Further to my post of full two minutes ago, I just realised that my great-great-grandmother came out at the right time and managed to avoid becoming either a damned whore or a God's policewoman. She did this by being a Jewish widow who ran a boarding house in downtown Melbourne. I'm pretty sure the stereotyopes didn't cover Jewish widows who ran boading houses in downtown Melbourne.

I wonder what it was like, though, being a woman like her in this particular set of colonies before 1870? I've read books, and I've walked streets, and I know timelines, but they don't seem to cover the experiences of a Jewish widow who ran a boarding house in downtown Melbourne. The newspapers don't help. The only time she's in them is a decade before her death when they predicted that she would die imminently because she was old and had just broken both her legs in a fall. Very stubborn, my great great grandmother. She just missed out on seeing the twentieth century.

Now that the excitement of a new article is past, I should do some more work.