Coming up next: Seth’s busiest month ever

October starts tomorrow.  As it stands already, not including anything new, this promises to be the busiest month of my entire career (at least to date). Along with the usual load of teaching and committee work…

1.  I have to finish an overdue assessment report for our writing program’s research-writing courses.  I’ve gathered the data and just have to write the thing, but still.

2.  Grievance Committee meets this weekend, and we have the largest stack of cases I’ve seen since I’ve been on the committee.  I also just filed some new ones, which are going to take some meetings to work out.

3.  The APSCUF Labor Conference is Oct 15-17.  My paper is ready, but it’s too long for the presentation slot I have, so I’ll need some time to cut (and practice) it.  If you’re an academic labor activist (or just interested in it), the conference promises to be a blast.

4.  I’m going to TCU in late October to give a talk about activism and rhetoric, and to visit a friend’s research methods course.

5.  The Rhetorical Activists manuscript is due to Routledge by the end of the month.  Most of the chapters are in fine shape, so that won’t be hard to manage, but I have to assemble the manuscript into one document (which is the kind of tedious work I’m really bad at), make sure I can print it (they ask for one complete hard copy), and collect contact info for all the contributors, make sure they sign their own contributor agreements, etc.  It’s all this kind of management work that makes me nuts, but we’re too close to the finish line not to get it done.

See you in November!

Pins and needles

9:30 am.  At some point today, a group of people (editors/managers) at a major publishing house will decide whether to publish Rhetorical Activists and Activist Rhetoricians, an edited collection my comrade Jonghwa and I have been working on for 5 years.

Another publisher has offered us a contract already, so it WILL be published at some point soon.  We are hoping for this particular contract today or tomorrow, though, because the publisher has a strong presence on both of the fields represented in the text (English and Communication). 

All the way through graduate school, my friend Tobi tried to coach me to deal with moments like these; she’s much better than I am at dealing with the times when a decision is no longer in her hands, when there’s nothing else she can do or say.  I’m not a control freak, but neither am I comfortable with situations that are entirely out of my hands. 

In the meantime, I still have two more classes to teach.  The first went well this morning, so I’m obviously not too distracted to concentrate.  I’d be really upset if I couldn’t concentrate on my teaching because of my scholarship; that would make me exactly the person I claimed not to be in my “Back to teaching 4/4″ post from a few weeks ago. 

But it’s a nervous time nonetheless.  Hope to have an answer soon. 

pant pant pant…