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I've actually done today's work. Despite myself. Life is full of mysteries. It is now also full of outlines for what I need to write, nearly 2/3 of the articles I will need to reference and most of the thinking for the whole. I am one step closer to whatever I need to be one step closer to. I have a list somewhere, that tells me...

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I'm busy doing trades with myself. If I don't do my messages (it's less than 9 degrees outside and a brisk walk doesn't appeal today) then I will do this number of words on one project and this number on another instead. I will finish these critical emails before dinner. If I do this amount of work then I get more coffee. I feel as if I'm marshalling a teenager into homework. The teenager would rather be chatting to friends or watching anime. She can't, though, not until those words are written and those emails sent.

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I'm almost halfway through my panic-de-la-semaine (the last of the big outstanding panics left over from the difficult months) and I am being entertained by its most recent development. The issues that came up at Continuum where the publicity for a book merged with personal public reactions to books merged with functions of reviewers merged with functions of critics have come back to haunt me. I'm having to sort out what I think at a higher level than I had previously (and I can think of several people who will find this annoying!) simply because I have to write about it properly and thoughtfully and chronicle it in a specific instance.

It's very good for me. It may not be very good for people around me. I find myself clarifying the difference between a personal reaction to a book (whether the book has been provided by a publisher or not) and critical reaction to a book (whether a book has been provided by a publisher or not). It's not where you write, or how many people read you, or how noted you are: it's how you think about books and what you say about them.

Critical reading and critical writing really, really need to be qualified. Not all reviews are critical. In fact, most aren't, hence my continuing hassles.

There are layers and levels of criticism. Some reviews tell about audience and about narrative strengths and weaknesses and, when they do that in sufficient depth, they belong on the critical spectrum. When they don't, I'm afraid all they do for me is tell me how the book fares in relation to the writer of the reviews other likes and dislikes and in all but the rarest cases I have no intention in becoming a regular reader of their blogs just to determine if I might also like and dislike what they do. It's part of the current game, though. At its best it provides a really interesting insight into that specific reader's world. At its worst, it's a publicity outlet for publishers who have found a useful source of quotes for their publicity operations.

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I'm writing about predispositions of various things which means I have moved from article-writing to drafting Chapter One of my dissertation. Once it's drafted, I will only have the Conclusion to go, for I have a tiny gem of an Introduction just finished.

When I print those two opening segments out, no doubt I'll find that they're both in need of work, but right now the Introduction is gemlike in its radiance and Chapter One is a terrible mess containing predispositions of all strange kinds. The only virtue of Chapter One is that I'll fit my notes into my word limit. Oh, and I've managed to quote Jenkins and Munslow in the same paragraph. Economy of something.

If I can fit reflexivity into the next paragraph and say something not-too-rude about postmodern theorists, then I shall mutter evilly and chuckle into the night. Or I shall finish my Abbey Girls book (which is totally full of pomo and reflexivity - how could it be otherwise?) and have a cuppa.


ETA: I did better than pomo! I mentioned Fuzzy Sapiens!!