Today turns out to be not-so-good. Chronic illnesses flaring up and some interesting weather. Nothing exciting at all, except from within my body, when it's wildly exciting in quite the wrong ways. I've read a bit more for the Aurealis awards and I've thought more about the Big Theory stuff I was pondering at unholy hours this morning, but that's all. I was up half the night with the precursor pain for today, but the pain hadn't actually arrived, so I used the time to do big contextual thinking for my article rewrite, for I have an article to edit and the edits are the most interesting ones I've had in about two years and I'm having a ball. I had so much fun last night that I forgot the reason why I had to get out of bed and I forgot I'd just taken painkillers and that I couldn't really see straight.
Let me focus on the ball rather than on the aches.
I'm a media res person. I love launching into a tale and long introductions are not something I relish. This mostly works for fiction, because long introductions aren't currently terribly popular. For a book chapter where I'm only writing that chapter, I'm reasonably good at starting things simply but not in media res because I tell myself firmly "Need to give intellectual contexts otherwise readers will be lost." For the article I'm working on right now, on the other hand, I needed broad theoretical contexts as well as the ones for the specific study I'd done and I was fighting giving them. This is because I had problems with how the big theory interfaced with what I was doing. It was as if we didn't fit in the same universe.
What I did last night was go back to one of the great theorists in this area and work out why I didn't feel as if he and I belonged in the same universe (which is why I left him out entirely in the first place and the editor, being a wise editor, had pointed this out, as had one of the peer-reviewers). This was awesomely cool and fun and one of the many reasons I probably should get that academic job.
I have three more articles by the Great Author to re-check and I'll use them to revisit my understanding from last night and to work out how they fit with my study in a more detailed way. Then I get to give my work this intellectual framing and send it to the editor and hope I've nailed it. I love this moment, when my inner world grows because someone has found a place where I needed to think more.
I'd read all the right writers and understood what they were saying from their own perspective, but I hadn't quite made the connections with the sorts of narratives I've been examining recently. No-one has. That's the whole point. I get to interpret and make sense of a whole bunch of things in relation to each other so that readers of my article will have their 'aha' moments.
This is what the historian side of me does. This is why I never stopped being an historian, throughout all the oddities of the last twenty-five years. It's odd to move from teaching all these breakthroughs to writing them into academic articles, but it's exciting, too. Even on a high pain day, when the weather grudges me my contentment, it's exciting.
I adore writing fiction and I love readers of my fiction, but I love equally breaking new intellectual ground and the funfair excitement of sharing it.
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