20150817.0630

I did a bit better today than I did yesterday with rising early, although not so well as I should have liked. I was out of bed at five this morning, which is good in that it afforded me a half-hour this morning I'd not otherwise have had. I had set my alarm for half past four, however, and I fought it with my snooze button this morning, so I did not meet my intended goal. Such is life.

Today, I begin teaching again. I have four sections of first-semester composition, the first of which begins in a scant two hours, and I am looking forward to having but one class prep to handle. I am less looking forward to the grading that will need doing throughout the term, though. The composition program requires four papers in multiple drafts reviewed by the instructor. I guess I am meant to earn my full-time status once again; I suppose I ought to be assiduous about tracking the time spent on the classroom work I do. Whether or not I would report that here or on the more "professional" site I maintain in support of my teaching and other work is unclear to me; perhaps I ought only to keep a time-sheet for my own purposes.

I was able to complete the freelance piece yesterday, which clears me to attend to other things today. Some of those things will be related to my teaching, of course; once the semester starts, there is always such work to do. I do have a job application on my desk that ought to go out today, so I will take care of that, certainly. Too, I am looking forward to reading the new Robin Hobb novel, which still sits in its shipping box on my desk, waiting for my attention. It has been a year since I read such a work, and I am eager to resume my long engagement with Hobb's corpus. Too, I feel as if I can get a fair bit of writing out of the work, not only in a blog post like last year's review, but also in my academic work. My master's thesis treated Hobb, after all, and I am not averse to revisiting the project, whether as a series of articles or as a shorter monograph. I certainly need the publication credits.

It is not only thence that I am poised to take them. I have, for instance, an accepted proposal waiting for my attention, and while I know the kinds of things I want to write in developing the paper from it (the piece is already structured; anticipatory abstracts are useful), I need to attend to actually writing the work. (Whether that happens before or after reading some other things, I am not yet sure.) I also maintain a list of ideas to treat, projects to complete, on my desktop. Some of them are recurring tasks, such as writing in this webspace. Others are long-term projects on which I work but slowly (oh, so slowly). Yet others are shorter papers, things to do as conference work or as short articles for minor publication. Each demands attention; somehow, I will ensure that each receives it, although it may take me a long time to do.