Moving right along...virtually, figuratively, and literally!

I don't really think anyone reads this blog, but if for some strange reason you do, and would like to keep continuing to do so, as of today I have moved all the content over to a new blog on Wordpress. I will continue to update my scintillating research progress there. So as of today, this forum is dormant. I'll keep it up for a while, but will eventually delete it. Consider yourself warned!

The URL for my new site is:

http://ellenrees.wordpress.com/ 

Do please come check it out, o reader (if you exist) and better yet leave a comment telling me what you think about the new format.

Flighty

Losing focus, and forgetting to post! I went back to chapter three and discovered that I'd been a little over eager in my cutting and pasting. Cleaning it up brought be down to 17 pages, and when I took stock it sure didn't seem very inspired. I decided to put it into time out and take a look at chapter 4 instead. I re-read Gunnar Larsen's Weekend i evigheten and wrote a page of introduction. Not quite sure why I'm so fragmented and unfocused right now. I guess there's just too many other things going on...

WORDS WRITTEN: a few

Whirlwind

I forgot to post on Monday. I did some work on the book, but it was pretty minor and scattered, and now a day later I can't even remember what it was specifically. Today I didn't do any writing, but I was very privileged to get to have a discussion with a colleague in another department that was super helpful in relation to the Wergeland section of chapter two. So there's things happening, but not really enough to report on in the usual way...

Exponential

Some days I really feel like I'm cheating. I sat down with my book outline this morning, and realized that I have published articles on every one of the texts that will make up chapter three. That means, of course, that I was able to copy large sections from those articles and paste them right into chapter three. Not everything will stay, quite a bit will be altered, and quite a bit more will be added, but still, I added over twenty pages in the course of ten minutes - that has to be cheating, right? At this rate, I have every hope of being done with the nineteenth century by the end of June. Suddenly the whole book seems do-able in a way that it never has before.

Numerically speaking, I've got over 29,000 words total for the whole project, which is pretty astounding. Whether they're good words or not is a completely different matter, of course. In terms of chapter three, I'll have to work really hard to recontextualize the sections that I've pasted in. Basically, in each of the four articles I have discussed the cabins in a particular context, and those don't all relate to the thrust of this chapter at all. The analyses of the cabins themselves are still useful, but I'll be relating them to different questions and to each other in new ways.

Oh, I did add one little piece of original writing to chapter two too, so I'm not totally coasting on my past glory.

WORDS WRITTEN: about 50

WORDS CANNIBALIZED: 7170

Myriad

I just googled "10,000" to see whether there were any cool names for that number, and learned that "myriad" actually means 10,000. I thought it just meant "lots." The whole point is that I passed the important myriad threshold on chapter 2 this morning, as I finished off the Wergeland section.

Even though I'm eight pages short of the 40-page goal, I think I'm going to call it finished, at least temporarily so. I doubt I'm going to be able to go any further with it unless I add another text, which I don't have. At this point, it will probably be more productive to move onto the next chapter, where I have a lot of material to work with, than to get bogged down in this one, which is probably always going to be the weakest of the project, no matter what. It's been so long since I looked at my full book outline that I can't even really remember what the focus of chapter 3 is, so it will take some time to reorient myself in the material.

ETA: I think I'm going to drop the Biedermeier raptus from last week, or at least put it in indefinite time out. It turns out to be a bigger problem than I thought, and though I'd still like to tackle it, it's going to have to wait until I'm further along with the cabin book.

WORDS WRITTEN: 383 for a grand total of 10,051

EATA: I really wanted to get at least a symbolic start on chapter 3 today, rather than putting it off until tomorrow. So, even though it's meager and weak, and will probably be jettisoned, I've now got 243 words down. Yay!

Squeeze

Things are really heating up at work, with grading and interviewing candidates for a position in my department all coming to a head this week and next. Today I barely had time to work on chapter two, but I forced myself to squeeze a tiny bit in any way, just to keep the momentum going, even if it turns out that what I wrote was crap. I read Wergeland's "Skildringer fra Hytterne" and added a little section on it. It still needs to be expanded and better integrated into the section on Wergeland, but at least it's there now as a place holder...

WORDS WRITTEN: 447

Back to the grind

I forced myself to take a break from the Romanticism/Biedermeier thing this weekend. I had some reading to do for something entirely unrelated, which I got through, and then this afternoon I took a little window of time  while the family was away to reconnect with chapter 2 of the cabin book. I reoriented myself in the chapter, and added a few little bits here and there. Most of the bulk came from adding what I had on Scribe the section on Collett's Amtmandens Døttre. I've made it onto the top of page 29, and I now know specifically what I need to do to finish out the analysis bits: I need to get Wergeland's article on the homes of the working class, which he published in his journal For Arbeiderklassen sometime in the early 1840s. To be honest, I didn't know that the phrase "working class" was in use in Norway in the 1840s, so it will be interesting to read his "edifying" writings for the workers. Seems pretty darned patronizing if you ask me...

WORDS WRITTEN: 440