Now – after two conferences earlier this semester – I am back to writing in a largely self-directed manner (that is, without the pressing exigency of deadlines), largely about what I like. I am trying to embrace the somewhat scattered results as a sign of intellectual curiosity rather than lack of focus. To whit, I am working – in a haphazard but continuous fashion – on:

1. Revising my conference paper on sensationalist novels of the Jamaican 1970s into an article, to be submitted in late January (yes, this one actually has a deadline).
2. Revising my conference paper (from a much earlier conference) on the 1950s radio serial Bold Venture (the closest thing to a deadline: I would like to have it under review somewhere by the end of the academic year).
3. Some strange kind of multimodal project on the textile arts in Caribbean literature that I am still figuring out; shape, process and product still to be determined.
4. Writing my second book, a study of Caribbean family sagas. There’s been some progress on this, largely in the form of conference papers that help me figure out what approaches to these texts seem productive. Current status is that I have (as of about a week ago) something like a chapter outline, which I will maybe share on this blog at some point, but am still shy about.

After a long spell of writing almost nothing, and finding the recovery from that spell (in early summer) really difficult (it took a long time to persuade myself that I, in fact, remembered how to write), I’m trying new approaches. My operative principles are: a) it’s more important to be writing (or pre-writing) consistently than to be always moving inexorably forward on one project, and b) planned procrastination, whereby one always has a backup project to jump to when one stalls on (or gets bored with) one’s “main” project.