Category: Writing
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Week -4: The Book is Finished!
. . . and it’s away! Shortly before midnight last night I hit send on the e-mail which delivered a full manuscript of The First Scottish Enlightenment to my editor at OUP. Alert readers may have noticed that my actual submission deadline was the end of July rather than the end of August. They may also…
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Week 8: A Complete Draft
I began the research project which ultimately led to this book in the summer of 2014 and had been thinking about it for a year or more before that, so it’s almost hard to believe that last week saw me write the final chapter (an unexpected addition which I only realised I needed quite late…
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Week 22: Strikes and Snow
This is the first week in which I’ve fallen behind my completion schedule. It’s all the more strange given that the week which has just gone by, on first glance, would seem to have been the ideal stretch of time in which to plow ahead with the book project. Why? Well, I’ve somewhat sophistically convinced…
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Week 25: A Chapter Down
We are currently in week 25. I used to organise my desk journal and the other paraphernalia of scheduling by weeks of term or semester, but that’s now been supplanted by the overarching countdown of the book manuscript and, by that highly specific calendar, we are twenty-five weeks away from hand-off to OUP. I’m now…
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Scheduling the Book
I survive in academia with the help of calendars and schedules: the paper diary that used to be enough to keep me organised when I was a student has expanded into a Google calendar, an increasingly complicated desk journal, and multiple tables and Gantt charts, but the principle remains the same. My latest schedule, though,…
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Research Days
The autumn semester has begun in Stirling and while I continue to work on the book project, it’s now being juggled alongside teaching, admin, organising a research seminar, coordinating my division’s presence at university open days, printing, and all of the other duties that go to make up a semester’s workload. Stirling, to do it…
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On Generative Writing
Almost a month ago, I talked about planning my summer writing goals and, especially, the book chapter I wanted to write first: a look at the reception of French archival and textual theories in early Enlightenment Scotland. I finished a first draft of that chapter earlier today and thought that now might be a good…