About 30 minutes ago I finished a draft of the manuscript. It runs from beginning to end. There are still some notes to myself in the footnotes, but it’s readable. I sent it to my students as promised, and I also sent it in for review. Later this week I will start distributing it to people who said they want to read part or all of it (and provide comments–that’s the deal).
Academic Writing Month or NaNoWriMo or whatever it was called wasn’t perfect, and November is a stupid month for academics to binge write, but it worked for me in a lot of ways. I am not sure I will ever choose to do it again in November, but it was nice to have a goal and make space to reach it, even during a busy semester. The next couple weeks I’ll have to do all the things I put on hold (recommendation letters! reviews!) but that was the deal.
I am also planning to take more time off, especially over break. I did manage mot of my Sundays off, and I think I lost about a day most weeks to medical stuff — either doctoring or something going wrong that laid me out–but I kind of sort of budgeted for that. I came in about 2 days later and more crowded at the end than I thought, but I’ll take it.