Snowed Under in Chicago: i.e. Unrealistic reading and writing plans before the end of the year

 A Heneghan Youth attacking during one of last year's snow events

When one’s ambition outstrips the confines of calendrical time one prioritizes I suppose.  As usual I had kicked too many assignments towards the touchline that is this December break and now I have some decisions to make - I can't do 'em all.  Minimally I have to get the following writing assignments finished:

1.      Finish the draft of our mulching experiment with Lauren Umek.  This is more than 50% done, but there is at least two more days of statistical analysis and a full re-write to go.  We’ll submit this to Biological Invasions by the end of the month.

2.      Microarthropods (free living soil mites and sprintails) in restoration projects.  A short piece on this for Restoration News Midwest

3.      A cheerful 3quarks daily piece on Death and Decay.

4.      A series of short pieces on Henri Lefebvre, Albert Borgmann, Aldo Leopold and Jack Kerouac etc for this blog (and ultimately my book)

5.      Some work on a couple of new proposals (actually a pressing priority). This includes some work on a proposal linking some philosophical work on biodiversity conservation with the scientific perspectives on this topic..

Of course to get these written I need to get a lot of reading done (mainly rereading, fortunately).   

Additionally I want to read a few things before the quarter begins in January.

• Nicomachean Ethics for the seminar I will take in winter with SeanKirkland
• Bill Jordan’s newer book (Making Nature Whole – some of which I read in draft).  I need to have this ready for the book launch event we at INC are hosting in January (look out for a note on this).
• I will also be rereading Bill’s Sunflower Forest (though I have this almost memorized since I have taught it so frequently) and a reread of Tim Morton’s Ecology without Nature and The Ecological Thought for an informal seminar we’ll host next year on Friday mornings (more info on this soon – let me know if you can to join) on “Deep, Dark and Shameful (see here).

Also I need apply myself to French translation so I can technically complete my MA in philosophy.

If I can get anything else written and read that will be gravy!

Writing fiction: turns out it's hard to do

Generally when I write for 3quarks I prefer to wait until the week or so before the column is due to get started.  I enjoy writing these pieces, but I don't want it to dig too much into my other writing commitments.  And though these columns are not masterpieces (thought I confess to having a soft spot for my post on my surgery experience (here), and for the first of my bodily fluids pieces (here)) nevertheless I typically get them finished, and they are generally not horrifyingly bad.

This month though I made the poor decision to try to write a piece of fiction - a ghost story of all things.  Now, I have written plenty of fiction over the years but never with a view to publication, online or anywhere else.  Like most Irishmen I have a half written novel manuscript on my hard drive, But I had forgotten just how difficult it is to write a satisfying story.  It seems that in writing fiction it is difficult to rehabilitate the writing once it has gone offtrack.  In writing a scientific manuscript, or an essay, or even a poem, I am typically able to redirect the ship once if it goes off course.  But a story when it decides to head for the shallow waters of mediocrity is determined, apparently, to wreck itself on the shoals.  Why is this, I wonder?

So I have an outline, a few hundred words of text, and about a day to get this sucker finished.  It's beginning to look awkward.  So do I exhume an older writing and get it ready for posting on Monday or do I knuckle down and see if by dint of the sweat of my brow and a dollop of writerly will get this fictional baby into some sort of shape, and post whatever emerges? Anyway here's a couple of lines of the story so far.  It's in the voice of a tediously loquacious Irishman living in Chicago (I suppose that would be me...):

“Our friend is now out of pain, and his was a pain of great immensity – ultimate, substantial pain – immense precisely because it was so seemingly trifling a thing.  A man might recover from being flattened by a truck only to take a nibble from a toadstool and perish in an instant.  The notebooks [the story is constructed from reading lab notebooks!], and there are hundreds of them, go back to his early adulthood, and as I gathered from reading them, so does the origin of his most peculiar problem, a problem so seemingly insignificant, that his death seems not only to come out of the shadows but the shadows might be said to have been the lethal instrument.” 

Anyway, I suppose I should be writing a story.