A Distraction…Make that Two Distractions

So I’ve spent the past two or three days working on a prospectus for the adjunct teaching rant book and this morning sent it off to the acquisitions editor at the desired press. Soon we should be hearing peals of laughter from the direction of Maryland echoing merrily across the land.

LOL! I’ll be surprised if this guy goes for it. But strange things happen. Occasionally.

The project morphed into a fair amount of work. I reworked and added to the introduction; rewrote some of the Adjunctorium material and added a bunch of essays to the recycled posts, bringing the number of entries to 45. Planned additions and revisions to the afterword. Wrote a proposal, table of contents, and chapter outline, put them together with the spiffed-up introduction and a short-form CV, and made the introduction’s citation & documentation conform to Chicago 16’s author-date format. Converted this mound of paper into a PDF and shipped it off, under an e-cover letter.

This little chore has been a mighty distraction from the dieting and exercising enterprise.

But then along came another, much more onerous, distraction: more pain!

The back was feeling more or less better — sometimes down as low as a .25 on a scale of 10. But over the past several days the pain gauge has risen to a definite 7. Down the tailbone and into the hip: my god it hurts!

I can barely walk around the house — it feels, weirdly, like one leg is somehow longer than the other, creating a bizarre limp — and really shouldn’t be driving the car, because I’m having a hard time lifting my foot from the gas pedal to the brake pedal.

Obviously, this brought a screeching halt to the weight-loss scheme. Actually, it was in hiatus, anyway: after 12½ pounds, I hit a plateau, so over the past four or five days haven’t been losing weight. But when the fat was burning away, what was working was 3½ miles of brisk walking and a half-mile of swimming. Right now just kicking my legs in the pool hurts.

That’s kaput. I can barely crawl from the back of the house to the kitchen, though I was able to bicycle the 3 1/2 miles this morning.

Had to bring the bike in the house so Gerardo could blower out the garage, and by the time all that was done there was no way I could roll the thing back out there. {sigh}

Decided to try a glass of wine, since alcohol often dulls the back pain. Naturally, this required a steak and potatoes, eh?

Naturally, the grill wouldn’t come on. So instead of roasting the potatoes and grilling the meat over the fire, I had to sauté them in butter. Very thinnening.

Didn’t work. Tasted good, though.

An hour or so ago, it dawned on me that since this pain is radically different from the usual aches and pains, maybe it is different. What if instead of a pinched nerve, it’s a real, actual muscle spasm?

Hm.

So I dropped one of the generic Flexerils that came my way when the Mayo guy speculated the back, hip, and foot pain were caused by some sort of chronic muscle spasm.

Stuff didn’t work on that, but in the hour or two since I took the thing this afternoon, the hip feels a little better. Not so’s I can walk around. But better.

Shit. This getting old business is for the birds.

Oh well. The question is, what will I do with this manuscript after the guy in Maryland rejects it?

Not, I expect, sink $1200 into graphic design and e-book conversion. A friend has recently started converting Word files to Kindle format. He’s only charging $250 or so, and he does a good job.

So I’ll need to decide whether to try another scholarly or mainline publisher or to just go ahead and peddle it myself on Amazon.

Don’t know. We’ll just have to see what kind of response it gets.

Image: Books. Johannes Jansson/Norden.org. Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Denmark license.