Busy, Busy

Well, the weekend vanished altogether as I worked up a revised proposal for this (tentative and potential) co-authored critical book on S.F.

It's been three years since I passed the viva for my doctoral thesis, and since then the only criticism I've done has been the occasional desultory book review. What's more I've written some 180,000 words of prose (longer than the thesis even when it was horribly in need of cutting), in a radically different, imaginative mode. It's proved extraordinarily difficult to wrench my brain back into the configuration required for producing that kind of writing, although I've found it pretty stimulating as well. I think, if this book goes ahead, that I'll need some kind of creative project running parallel with it in order to retain my sanity.

On the other hand, maybe sanity is overrated, and a decent sabbatical from fiction is just what my brain needs to come up with loads of exciting new ideas. Time will tell.

Yesterday I was on a Library I.T. course thing for work, which being a Library I.T. course thing was largely dominated by librarians asking our preternaturally patient (and possibly even sedated) trainer questions like: "Hang on, what did you do just then?", "No, I mean the bit before that?", "Won't our students find this far too complicated?", "Can't you just make the computer clever enough to spot when I've made a mistake?", "Why can't things just stay like they were in the seventies?" and "No, I still don't understand the thing you did half an hour ago".

Today I'm back at St Brad's, but tomorrow is Maundy Thursday and therefore the last day of term, so hurrah. I'll have a total of 18 days of not having to come in to work at all, during the course of which I get to watch three episodes of new Doctor Who. So hurrah again.

Details are currently sparse to non-existent, but it is now looking as if I should be talking at the Greenbelt festival again this August, whether at "Between the Lines" as before or in one of the larger venues. Hopefully it will be the latter, as, my preferred topic this year is (predictably enough) "The Spirituality of Doctor Who".

So, I'll be keeping my fingers crossed -- and taking notes come Saturday evening.