Another Draft In

After much agonizing, kicking, fussing, gnashing of teeth, and spleen, I finally today turned in a draft of Chapter 3. It’s ugly, but it’s a draft. And I’m more than relieved to have the horrible thing off my desk, even though it’s the place where I really start synthesizing my own theory of the interrelationships of class, economy, technology, and composition pedagogy and theory, because I’ve been incredibly vile and pissy and distracted these past few weeks while working on it, like practically snarling at almost anybody who crossed my path, to the point where if I were dating someone right now, this would’ve been when she said, “OK, we’re done; I’m not putting up with your silly crap anymore.” But, yes, it’s a draft. Very, very far from a polished final state, but at least initially complete, like a whole entire honest-to-goodness dissertation chapter.

So OK: deep breath, relax. Time to have some tea, maybe. Time to indulge in a little turn-off-the-brain mass-market McMyth reading. And TV. I could use some really dumb TV.

And the other cool thing is that I stopped by the Writing Program office and picked up the second edition of The Text-Wrestling Book, the FYC textbook our program’s fifteen-member “editorial collective” (of which I was lucky enough to be a part for both editions) has put a whole lot of work into these past couple years. And one thing that kinda startled me is that I took the idea Lesley proposed for the cover and did a few dummy versions of it in Photoshop, so we could tweak it some and then show it to the Kendall-Hunt artists and say, “This is sort of how we’d like the cover to look,” and they actually used most of the elements of the thing I put together from Lesley’s idea. I mean, they made some substantial necessary improvements — making the title pop more, filling in the back cover that I’d left pretty bare — but I was substantially amazed that they’d use the work of someone who’s very much Not A Designer, rather than having their in-house artists do something with it. So I’m simultaneously pleased and a little apprehensive, like worrying: “What if people think it sucks?”

Meh. Then they think it sucks. There’ll be another edition with a different cover in a couple years.

But working on the book was a lot of fun (and a lot of work for all of us involved), and I think it’s pretty good, and I was glad to be able to contribute to it as a co-editor, in addition to being able to offer my beginner’s Photoshop skills.