First week of January, with some books

It is so strange working on this project. I am not yet logging as many hours a day as I'd like (although I may be subliminally influenced by knowing it is still the time of "winter break," plus dealing with the extreme cold, which I have to take my dog out into five to six times a day, has been very enervating) but I will say I have worked on the project every single day, gladly, and almost always written. Which is vastly different to my relationship to any academic writing project I've done, short of an impending deadline.

I am focusing on the first section now, although I still don't have a clear sense of how I want to work. It is easiest to write pieces of it as they arise and ask to be written, and not to force myself to work in a linear way, especially as I don't yet have a clear sense of linearity for this section. And yet, I have felt befuddled at moments: "Does this part go here? Or somewhere else? What will I have said already by this point?" I have come to realize that at least trying to work from the beginning would help me get hold of a sense of what I am building. So I have just started to work on that. It doesn't mean I can't write bits out of order if they really call out to be drafted.

I am trying not to get dismayed, and so far succeeding pretty well. Writing a first section is hard (or first dissertation chapter, or first anything), and I think writing the first section of a complex, hybrid, only loosely linear book is hard, establishing the voice and movement and then too some of the basic historical story I am dealing with. And I may be proven wrong, but the specifics I am trying to interweave in this particular section feel perhaps the most complicated in the book too.  Anyway, I keep telling myself that it seems hard because it is objectively hard, not because I'm stupid or a bad writer or the project isn't worth doing.

The other hard thing is figuring out how much and what to read and how much time to spend doing it and how much I need to read before I write. I have my ingrained academic expectations about this, but I don't know the degree to which those are useful or hurtful. I could spend a month catching up on the scholarship on women and/as monsters in the early modern period, but where would that get me? This is not an academic book (and yet I don't want it to violate my academic standards!), and I deeply know a great deal about what I am writing about, even though I need to freshen up many parts of it. I am not looking to the words of others to tell me how to interpret, although maybe to spark ideas or inspiration.

Besides the more historical or academic things I need to read or review, for this section in particular I want to read various more general-audience things about women and power, about misogyny, about what happened to Hillary, about life under Trump. Of course going back this would be like reading the whole canon of feminism, but I'm trying to keep it a few new, timely things at least for now. Again I'm telling myself it's not like I (and most of my imagined readers) don't know these things, it's not the point of my writing to teach people about it, only to refract it through the lens of my particular obsessions, the historical and personal stories I want to tell.

Last night I read Women and Power: A Manifesto by Mary Beard. Great title, fine ideas, but basically don't bother -- I can't believe a skinny, superficial lecture (or is it two?) got made into an actual book. At least it wasn't a big time investment to find that out! I also just got the collection Nasty Women: Feminism, Resistance, and Revolution in Trump's America which I think I'll start this weekend. I have ordered Susan Bordo's The Destruction of Hillary Clinton: Untangling the Political Forces, Media Culture, and Assault on Fact that Decided the 2016 Election. Lindy West's Shrill is waiting on my Kindle as something that might be both entertaining and relevant.

And of course, there's Hillary's What Happened. I got in on preorder in hardcover but no, I haven't read it yet. I couldn't bear to, and wanted to wait until I had some more time and space and peace and the ability to write whatever I needed to in response.

I know this is an embarrassingly short and thin list (of course there are a bunch of online commentary pieces too). Are there other books, old or new, that anyone reading this thinks I need to be reading?

Today is Friday . . . On Monday, January 8, my UNI colleagues go back to work for spring semester. And I do not. I can't even begin to describe how grateful I am for this.

In other news, it occurred to me I should use an image of Mary Dyer as my profile picture for my Twitter account, since my handle is after all @NastyMaryDyer. Ha. So I am using a cropped version of this -- I wanted to emphasize her speech rather than her punishment.