My Productivity Record for Aug. 2016 to Aug. 2017

It sure would make sense to do these productivity reports for a calendar year, but the August-August timeline -- basically the academic year -- works just fine too, I suppose. In my previous yearly productivity report, I managed 63,000 words of writing, most of it publishable, and I expressed hopes that my upcoming year on a Writing Fellowship would see that output rise. I didn't quite make that, primarily because of job applications and the massive revisions my dissertation underwent during February and March, which meant that I couldn't accomplish any new work. But even if I wasn't quite convinced about the necessity of those revisions, at least the beast is done, and life's going good.

 So, the output:

  • Essay on narrative theory and world construction in The Hobbit (under review) -- 6,000 words
  • Essay on J.R.R. Tolkien and why he nominated E.M. Forster for the 1954 Nobel Prize (forthcoming) -- 9,000 words
  • Essay on Glen Cook's Instrumentalities of the Night series (revise & resubmit) -- 7,000 words
  • Dissertation chapter 4 -- 20,000 words. (Yes, it was a long chapter!)
  • Dissertation introduction -- 11,000 words
  • Four book reviews
    • One on Fimi and Higgins (eds), A Secret Vice, 1500 words
    • One on Edmund Gordon's The Invention of Angela Carter, 1500 words
    • One on Jad Smith's Alfred Bester, 1500 words
    • One on Jamie Williamson's The Evolution of Modern Fantasy -- 1,000 words.
  • One conference paper on Glen Cook, 1500 words
Sum total: 60,000 words. 

Other big time sucks (besides the major last-minute revisions to my dissertation) included editing Scientia et Humanitas and -- oh god -- those god-awful job applications, which constitute a full-time job in themselves. 

One item worthy of note: I managed to write all my dissertation chapters within the single calendar year of 2016. Of course, February and March of 2017 saw me rewriting quite a bit of that, but since I liked my original versions slightly better, I think I can legitimately say that I wrote my dissertation in a single year.

Anyway, now that I'm about to teach full-time, next year's productivity report won't be as glitzy, but I'll keep chugging along anyway. 

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