Finishing

Sometimes I think the book I am finishing is brilliant. Sometimes I think it's under-researched, under-theorised and badly written.

Sometimes I think I'll have it ready to send off by the 21st of this month, as promised. Sometimes I think I'm just deluding myself.

Nevertheless, it finally now feels I am on a train that won't stop till I get there. There's a closing finality about each long sentence I break into two, each extraneous comma I remove, each query ("follow up", it says) I either resolve or abandon, each time I check whether I have already referred to a book or article so I can use its abbreviated title in the notes (Chicago style, I love you).

On Sunday I decided not to work on it late at night because it then became too hard to sleep. Yesterday I worked on it till midnight and slept all night, dreaming vividly, but sleeping all the same.

Nearly there.

Why a facial recognition problem is a problem

At Readings for a book launch on Friday (the second that week) I was trying to get close to the action and found myself stuck in a long aisle with no chance of seeing anything. I passed a woman who smiled at me and looked familiar, and assuming she was a graduate student in my school (there are lots and lots) I made a cheery remark about what a terrible place it was for a booklaunch. (And it is, in its logistics, though I love that they are willing to have academic book launches there.) You can't see or hear the action very well, and if you are a customer wanting to browse those sections for an hour, it's impossible.  Anyway I explained all this to the poor girl, then went back around and up another aisle and found some people I knew. During the launch speech, I looked over to the cash register where the wine was being served, and sure enough, there she was, obviously an employee. Well, she may also be a graduate student. But I did feel foolish. But have learned that it only makes it worse to go and apologise for my rudeness: viz. "I'm sorry I was rude about your workplace: I thought you smiled at me and I wrongly assumed I should have known who you were — but didn't." And even worse to start explaining about the whole face-blindness syndrome.

Also, what I want to know is this: how many times is it acceptable to refer to your own work when launching a book by someone else? Not that many, I would have said. I have just been invited to do my first launch speech, in December, so my mind is much occupied by the genre.

Pressing "send"

Had you been close to my house ten minutes ago, you would have heard a loud "squeak". That was the sound of me pressing "Send" as I sent off the first six chapters of my book on the Order of the Garter to the very patient editor at the big US press I hope will publish this book. We've never signed a contract to publish, which was a good idea as I would never have met a deadline, and it would have just been a source of stress (as I'm writing this post, I can see in the email "progress" window that a quarter of the ms. has now been sent).

The deal is that these chapters can now go out to be read, while I finish the last, a third of which is drafted.

There are many stages to go, of course. If the reports are positive, I hope we'll then sign a contract; and while I secretly hope and believe the readers will think it's perfect as it is, there will certainly be changes to make. Then there's final approval, copy-editing (half of the message has now gone), tracking down of permissions for images, checking, and cross-checking of references, compilation of bibliography and all the rest of it.

Still, this is a big day: the first, very big milestone on the last stretch towards completion.

What am I going to do now?

I'm going to go outside and feed the goldfish, then come back in and work on a grant application for an hour or so. And then tonight, I am going to see this. How's that for timing?

And how's this? Entourage has just played its little chimes: message SENT.

Late Medieval and Early Modern Studies

An announcement about three new books in the Late Medieval and Early Modern Studies series published by Brepols and co-ordinated by an editorial team from Melbourne and Arizona (specifically, me, Charles Zika, Ian Moulton and Fred Keifer, with a larger advisory board).

Here is our blurb:

Jointly directed by Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies and the University of Melbourne and published by Brepols, this series covers the historical period in Western and Central Europe from ca. 1300 to ca. 1650. It concentrates on topics of broad cultural, religious, intellectual and literary history. The editors are particularly interested in studies that are distinguished by

• their broad chronological range;
• their spanning of time periods such as late medieval, Renaissance, Reformation, early modern;
• their straddling of national borders and historiographies;
• their cross-disciplinary approach.

A list of books in the series is available in Brepols’ online catalogue at www.brepols.com. The Brepols code for the series is LMEMS.

If you have an idea for a book that you think would fit this series' remit (a word I only started to use once I got involved with this series), please contact me or any of the editors.

These three latest titles might be of particular interest to readers of this blog, as they deal with gender studies, the medieval/early modern transition in English literature, and the theatre of the body in seventeenth-century England. All are fabulous!

Practices of Gender in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, edited by Megan Cassidy-Welch and Peter Sherlock

The Theatre of the Body: Staging Death and Embodying Life in Early Modern London, by Kate Cregan

Performing the Middle Ages, from 'Beowulf' to 'Othello', by Andrew James Johnston

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