Stone-ground.

After nearly two weeks of ignoring my book proposal, I have my nose back to the grindstone today. The proposal itself is ready to go--at this point, I have only to revise into a "sample" book chapter an article which used to be a chapter of my dissertation. Seems like it would have been easier if I'd cut out the middleman somewhere, but true to form I took a while to get my mind around my point, and apparently needed the middleman's company to do so.

According to the good advice I've received, I'm trying to front-load my sample chapter with the fireworks of the chapter's argument, and to connect it really excitingly to the rest of the book. But, as you know, I haven't written the rest of the book (though I have two other lovely but similarly unintegrated articles based on chapters from my now-discarded diss). It's the ligaments of the thing that are killing me. I'm having to commit much fakery in order to frame this sample chapter in the context of my larger argument.

Listen: I'm a poet, for crying out loud. When I send a poetry manuscript to the publisher, it's done, with every damned comma obsessively accounted for. I'm not accustomed to selling myself on so much speculation.