Wow! I just finished studying and annotating 800 pages (yes, that’s eight hundred) of printed-out research material for the Boob Book! Wa-hooooo!
About 80 percent of it consists of abstracts or full texts of medical and genetic research studies; most of the rest is resource material published by various nonprofits. 😀 You’ll love this one:
Elmore, Joann G., Gary M. Longton, Patricia A. Carney, Berta M. Geller, Tracy Onega, Anna N. A. Tosteson, Heidi D. Nelson, Margaret S. Pepe, Kimberly H. Allison, Stuart J. Schnitt, Frances P. O’Malley, and Donald L. Weaver. “Diagnostic Concordance among Pathologists Interpreting Breast Biopsy Specimens.” Journal of the American Medical Association 313, vol. 11 (March 17, 2015): 1122-1132. doi:10.1001/jama.2015.1405. http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=2203798.
Hurry right out and buy it!
Now the next stage before I can begin the actual writing is to take that stack of index cards and sort them according to the topics in the book’s outline. That’ll take a few days, but it shouldn’t be too difficult.
With an introduction in draft, all that’s left to do by way of building a prospectus to send to publishers and agents will be to write one solid chapter — any chapter — and one of the appendices, trick out the rough outline as a full-blown chapter outline, and distill that into the form of a proposed table of contents. And, of course, write the proposal itself, in the form of a cover letter.
In theory, I could get that done in two or three weeks…if I just didn’t have so goddamn much to have to do.
Tomorrow is gone — so is tonight, for that matter. Choir practice tonight; then out to Scottsdale at 7 a.m. tomorrow; from there grab some grocery items on the way back into town and then right back out the door to a mid-day birthday shebang kindly hosted by dear friends. That will blow the afternoon. The evening is already claimed by the Arizona Book Publishing Association, which is rising from the grave for a kind of alumni jamboree that I’ve pledged to attend.
Meanwhile, student papers are pouring in. The 235s had query letters due Monday and they have a substantial article due on Friday, and the same day the 102s will dump a mountain of 2500-word papers on us. Since those two 102 sections are full of good little doobies, several of them have already posted their papers. It would be good to start reading those, given that plowing through 100,000 words of student drivel is no small endeavor.
Honest to God. Whose idea WAS it to assign a 2500-word research paper to cohorts of students who have never written a sourced paper in their young lives?
Anyway, grades are not due until Friday morning. Most of the waking moments between 10 p.m. tomorrow and 11:30 a.m. Friday the 15th will be absorbed by reading that stuff.
And that means it’ll be 10 days before I can get back to doing my own thing. Even then, the time will not be my own: I have to build a summer course as soon as the spring sections end, and while I’m at it, I should build the fall sections, too.
So. In reality, make it three, maybe four weeks before I get any real work done on the Boob Book project.
Is there any question why I never get anything done?
🙄
Good luck. Sounds like it has the potential to be overwhelming, but that you’re addressing that with your plan, and breaking things into smaller phases.
Been there and done that before… It’s essentially the same as writing a dissertation, without the committee. One step at a time.