I also finished my conference paper of the summer and a couple of hours later presented it. This was the one about Nepali indigenous film festivals. The good news is, I did 4 great (as in useful) interviews, and did what prior reading there was in journals, and had the PowerPoint done in advance. The bad news is, I still put off the writing until I drove to the conference, then fell asleep in my motel room the night before the presentation. Then up, wrote a page, then lay down and fell asleep again(!), then woke up with not enough time to even write the paper and complete it before the panel. But then somehow, even budgeting my time at an unrealistic pace, I ended up exceeding that pace because I knew exactly what I wanted to say. It was not as elegantly phrased as I would have liked – that can come with revision into a manuscript – but it was fine enough. Aside from the other panelists, one of whom was from India, there were only 4 other people in the audience. The Indian professor said to me after he knew nothing about the Nepali caste system so everything I presented was new to him.
So, though the writing process itself was painful and horrible, I am feeling good enough about what I am saying, and the multilayered nature of the topic, that I have the raw material to start expanding and I’m looking forward to going back to it. The IVSA journal (this was the International Visual Sociology Association conference) would be a perfect venue for this, and I think it would fit right in, and would be seen by all my peers at the conference. It was good to reconnect with them – it’s a fun, eclectic group of people, and I just found out one of my colleagues/friends from this conference just got a job at Temple, so we could even think about collaborating (which is funny come to think of it, because his last name is the same as the last name of one of my departmental colleagues with whom I have also thought of collaborating).
This week is tied up with a bunch of house stuff and the first week of summer school, then the following week I have 2 lectures to prepare. So I’m not expecting much, but it would be a good time to do my film review, transcribe my other conference paper for the book chapter, and select the photos for my photo essay. I don’t think I can write 1,000 words a day, but that’s not what I need to do next. I need to get these 3 shorter projects out of the way.
2019 Summer Writing Challenge 