An update

I am wrestling my academic book manuscript into submission, and believe I am still on track for submitting the entire thing with the rest of tenure materials by the end of the day on Friday.

It will be a great relief to e-mail it to my editor at the same time--this thing's been a millstone round my neck, I like it but I will be glad to be (provisionally--there'll be one more round of revisions once I get readers' reports, then the usual quotation-checking, copy-editing, proofreading, indexing, etc.) rid of it! The introduction is quite good, I think...

I was fantasizing earlier this week about taking a guilt-free week and a half off from all non-school-related work. (Of course, it is a true fact that my thermostat, as it were, is set very high... The projected time off included the regulation classes and office hours and meetings with students, plus one road race, four other runs, three hard-core swim workouts and a swimming lesson concentrating on non-front-crawl-related matters, several serious sessions at the gym, three or four bike rides, a considerable amount of light reading and a lot of blogging. But it's the guilt-free-ness that's crucial--normally I am doing all of these things and just feeling intense pangs of irresponsibility and neglectfulness about not having time to write!)

But then my other editor called this afternoon to say that she was about to overnight the copy-edited manuscript of the novel to me. It's due back to her a week and a half from now.

My time off!

I am now leafing through my appointment book to see when I can schedule the nervous breakdown. Oh dear, I think I really will not have time for it until January, unless an unexpected window of opportunity opens...