Channeling Lorna

Why? Because for the first time ever, q and I have retreated from the blazing heat and sweltering stuffiness of the Livingston into the air conditioned refuge of Cafe 59. Q is plugging away on her second chapter, and I'm endlessly poking the chapter I'm now referring to, with a hearty chortle, my charticle! How delightful, yes? I wish I could take credit, but it was the neologism of my better half. Why "charticle"? Because it is a chapter that I'm trying, and perhaps failing, to convert into an article. Surely, you might think, it wouldn't be that much work. After all, the chapter was fairly well received and all that. I'd already done some revisions, and so on. Of course, what you would be forgetting is that for some of us (not all *coughqueercat*) the chapter must be fed into the proverbial grinder and what comes out may only bear a slight resemblance to the previous thing. In that spirit, I started out with a 50-odd page document. I've since cut approximately 20 pages and rewritten whole passages including the entire introduction.
And other stuff of course...transitions...blah blah. I realized all of a sudden that "barbaristic" isn't a word, though I had used it as one on my first page. Who would have thought? Not that I'm against coining words because clearly I'm all about it. And I would argue that academic writing is uniquely suited to the coining of neologisms. There are so many words that really should be words as well as so many that are words that nonetheless nobody knows. I was mildly shocked when I described something to a co-worker recently as gelatinous and she responded with a "huh?" "Viscous," I explained. "Huh?" she said. Not that such things really matter. They merely flag my particular brand of mudgeon. Which, indeed, has enjoyed free rein of late as my disdain for the "Can you double it? I'm walking" crowd intensifies. It all makes me think that the end of the summer heralds my return to the entirely different set of anxieties and difficulties that is teaching. Things to look forward to.