June 1, 2012 · 9:08 pm

Getting to Good Enough

This week I worked on another writing task – a new type of composition that left me perplexed and struggling at times. I banged my head against the keyboard time and again as the piece refused to jell until, in the middle of the night, I realized that reorganization would solve my problem. I needed to return to my original conception, sketched out a year ago. Once I did, the words flowed.

Well, maybe not flowed, but they came out. It was still more work and done with less certainty than I’d experience drafting a conventional chapter or article. That shouldn’t surprise me, now, should it? When you move out of your comfort zone to try something different, it won’t be as easy as doing the tasks at which you’re practiced. In the end, the composition was complete and, most importantly, it was good enough for a first draft that would go off to be edited by a collaborator. And that’s the key: getting to good enough.

What I wrote isn’t perfect but it will never be. It can be better but the marginal return of my fiddling with it for hours and days more without feedback? That’s extremely limited. What my writing needs right now is another set of eyes, preferably ones that are connected to a virtual red pen that will mark up and tweak the piece. Heck, I’d be grateful if the response was simply to eviscerate it and say “you missed this, this and this.”

Too often we jinx ourselves by imagining that our first drafts will be perfect and that they’ll inspire a swooning reaction in their first reading. “What a genius! Let’s print this right now!”

That’s ridiculous and damaging thinking because, of course, nobody’s perfect (or ‘pobody’s nerfect’ as we used to say in the seventies). But every one of us can get to good enough with our writing and then enlist someone else’s help to make it better.

Mind you, I’m incredibly grateful that I have friends and colleagues who generously offer to review and critique my work and I’m happy to do the same for them in return. After all, thoughtful criticism helps me improve as a writer, teacher and editor. And isn’t that good enough?

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May 25, 2012 · 9:37 pm

#Congress2012

This weekend sees the launch of this year’s edition of the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences. I still say “the Learneds” even though that’s not been the name of this monster round-up of Canadian academic society meetings for years. What can I say? I’m a historian!

I’m speaking at the Canadian Society for Renaissance Studies on Sunday morning – it’ll just be a short trip in and out for me this year as I’m still swamped with popular culture and history projects as well as an article I want to submit to an academic journal before the end of June.

But if you’re hanging around the Waterloo campus this weekend or checking out the Congress Expo, where all the publishers will be setting up shop, look for me. Or follow along on Twitter: that’s where I’ll be looking for the latest news myself.

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May 23, 2012 · 9:10 pm

Small World (a boardgame review)

Small World Board Game We’re a family of geeks. (Sorry, girls, but that’s how we raised you.) So, when Geek and Sundry rolled out last month, we were hooked. Web series of awesomeness, ahoy! Chief among these is Tabletop masterminded by Wil Wheaton: a smart and genial geek god. (Yes, he’s also the actor who played Wesley Crusher on Star Trek: The Next Generation.)

One of the first games that he reviewed and played with guests on the show was Small World (tagline? “It’s a world of (S)laughter”) – a fast-paced board game of strategy, conquest and screwing over your opponents generally having fun.

How do you play? You play a randomly specialized fantasy race so you might end up with the Wealthy Amazons, Pillaging Tritons, Seafaring Elves, Diplomatic Giants from the mash-ups out on the table in any turn. Conquer and hold as much territory as you can, paying attention to special bonuses you can exploit (Humans get bonuses for farmland, Dwarves enjoy more revenue from controlling mines) and, when your opponents nibble away too much at your conquests, go into “decline” where you’re free to start a new combination in the next turn (meanwhile collecting some revenue from all of your old groups’ tiles still on the board).

We got a copy last week and have played, what?, about ten games so far? (A couple of these have been done back to back as it’s a short game, especially if you’ve gone with the 2-3 player option.) It’s addictive, absurd and adorable.

They have expansion packs. Maybe we’ll have to make a detour by another gaming store on our way down to the Congress to see if we can pick a little something up. Which reminds me, I really need to call it quits with the revisions to my conference paper. Maybe after one more game. . . .

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May 17, 2012 · 10:07 pm

Learning from Failure

Not my students’ but my own. I got the official letter today: the internal institutional research grant for which I applied? I didn’t get it. I’d actually sussed that out more than a week ago as I heard from other colleagues who’d gotten emails about their success and then a message from the dean about the overall percentage and numbers of successful versus unsuccessful in the various faculties. It was pretty easy to do the math and realize that if A, B, C and D all got emails about their grants, E, F and yours truly who got no email weren’t successful.

The letter, when it came, was brief and regretful. The feedback wasn’t entirely helpful: according to the comments, committee members felt that my application landed somewhere in-between a publication and a research project grant. They also felt that the research wasn’t entirely new (since I’d proposed moving forward from the preliminary work I’d done last summer for my paper at the Berks).

I’m hoping to learn from the failure but also not to dwell on that. I admit, it’d be nicer to have been successful than not but I’m not about to lose sleep over the one-off assessment about one part of my work given of a panel of people far outside of my discipline. At the same time, a fairly similar panel will be convened for the same competition next year – if I can ‘crack’ this one, I can better plan for the next.

So, it’s time to learn from this go-round. I would like to see what they consider a successful purely research project – I’ll review over some of the applications my successful colleagues shared during our run-up to the application. Did I err by naming specific journals in which I’d like to place the results of the coming year’s research? Would I have been better to propose a publication grant for those would-be articles? I’m doubtful on that front given that for publication grants they seem to want to give money only to people who have an accepted manuscript that needs subvention. None of my publications, accepted or under consideration for the next year would fit that category.

Mostly, I’d like to clarify how the novelty issue factored in and if there’s any point in applying for the next stage of the broader project next year. Because I’m not someone who starts and finishes projects in a blink of an eye. This work on stepmothers I want to take all the way to a monograph. If that means that my institution won’t be able to financially support me, so be it. One nice element about my kind of history is that it’s fairly easy to do with one person, a plane ticket and a cheap squat somewhere near the archives.

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May 14, 2012 · 3:21 pm

Star Wars and History

Star Wars and History cover

I can finally share the gorgeous cover for Star Wars and History that should be out in bookstores this November. A lot of talented people have contributed to this collection and you’re going to have such fun reading the histories as well as reviewing the illustrations drawn from historical and Lucasfilm images.

It’s been a lot of work (and there’s still some to go as we’re in the midst of copy edits) but so very rewarding. Fourteen-year-old me, who fell hard for Star Wars even before the film hit the theaters thanks to an early look at the novelization would have been so excited to know that someday I’d be working on this project.

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May 13, 2012 · 5:37 pm

Picture Perfect Mother’s Day

I have a digital picture frame that I’ve finally set up. I loaded the SD card with a hundred or so images off of my computer: pets, kids, vacations, the garden. Then I plugged it in, programmed it and left it to run on the end table in the living room, just beside my customary seat.

It’s not hi-res but it’s engrossing to see the pictures refresh through an endless cycle: our old sheltie in the shady backyard of our last house, younger daughter in the Teletubbies costume she wore for her first trick-or-treating (and my mother, who’s since passed away, there in the picture with her), Odo, our gigantic cat when he was a tiny ball of fluff who’d just come home with us, elder daughter riding a horse, all four of us together at Christmas. . . .

My husband says it’s like living in the future. I’d agree and add, a pretty good one at that.

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May 12, 2012 · 7:28 pm

Unexpected Alignment

This week I’ve been working on a conference paper that I’ll be presenting at the end of the month, trawling through rafts of inquisitions post mortem and trial cases, looking for information about women’s interactions and women’s networking.

It’s going well, maybe even better than I’d expected, because I was reminded of a local colloquium paper I’d given in 2010 on the question of reputation in criminal trials and among the poor and dependent. That had seemed a bit of a dead-end at the time, interesting but there wasn’t quite enough information in and of itself to warrant an article. However, reputation combined with women’s networking starts to ring all sorts of bells. Women were often being called upon to attest for another’s character. Women accused at the Old Bailey needed someone to attest to their honesty and their virtue. When we’re dealing with unmarried women, it was even more critical for women to enjoy the support and testimony of other women.

And, yes, I know that reputation was important for men but not in the same way – their character as upright, honest men didn’t delve into the complexities of sexual reputation. A woman testifying to a man’s reputation seems unremarkable. I’m still waiting to find a case where a man attests to a woman’s reputation excepting in the case of an elderly widow.

This (re)discovery of this preliminary research and how it relates to my current work has cheered me up. I’ve been following my own advice to write early, write often but it’s even better when what I’ve written before adds to my current project.

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May 8, 2012 · 7:15 pm

Pinteresting Books

I’ve joined Pinterest so I have a place to brainstorm about course readings. Seriously: it’s turning out to be a great tool as I plan for the fall term by pinning all the possible texts.

It was easy to start – I requested an invitation and received it later that same day. Now I have a couple of “boards” (i.e. subtopics) to which I can add images & links. So? Meet my history books lineup: mostly a listing of possibilities for the Tudor/Stuart senior seminars I’ll be teaching in Fall/Winter with a few other notes, here and there adding in a few prospects for western civ and the grad historical methods classes.

It’s a great way to consider a bunch of options at a glance – I can add and add to my heart’s content but I won’t be overwhelmed by long and unwieldy lists I fail to properly track for each course. And aren’t all those covers pretty? (Or at least most of them!)

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May 1, 2012 · 10:42 pm

Out with the Old

Ding, dong, the term is dead. Well, except for one last grad course assignment to wrangle. I have to get the chair to sign off on the big survey class’s marks tomorrow morning, as well, but, really, it’s done. I taught two undergraduate classes, one graduate directed readings for two students (so two separate classes but we kind of mushed them up by finding common ground for this past term) and yet one other graduate class that actually integrated in with my senior seminar. Officially four classes on my plate with just over a hundred students between them all.

This term, I’ve also written two short chapters (well, solo-written one, and co-written the other) as well as prepared and submitted a research grant. I’ve edited so many chapters, I’m no longer able to keep count of those!

No time to rest: I’m already knee-deep in the thick of other projects. We’re copy-editing STar Wars and History (which is a fascinating process in and of itself), I’m back to draft-editing chapters for The Hobbit and History and putting in a few hours on my regular research agenda, each week until our July vacation.

Oh, and there are book orders for the fall. And a personnel committee meeting. Oh, and I need to follow up on that research grant application. And get working on the next one. And there’s the conference paper for the end of the month, I need to pull that together, too!

Oh, lordie. I’d better stop thinking right now. I promised Mike I’d take off a day or two. Maybe Friday?

How’s your May shaping up? Crazily busy with conference trips, grading galore and classes still to meet? Or are any of you wrapping matters up already. Take a break from the grind and let us know!

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April 26, 2012 · 7:11 pm

Mary Broadbent: a London Life

Over at London Lives, my Biography of Mary Broadbent is live and full of the sad details I’ve shared earlier on this blog.

Two elements that made it into the biography I never mentioned here was how I pieced together her family background a bit more through the website Family Search. I found her parents’ marriage in 1712 and her father’s remarriage in 1724 after a little bit of sleuthing. Her mother was born in the same parish in 1681: Elizabet5h was 31 when she wed and not even 35 when she died.

Another fascinating tidbit that I uncovered when I asked myself “why might Mary Broadbent suddenly resort to the workhouse in the winter of 1763?” I stumbled upon mention of a particularly brutal winter which I was able to document by accessing some historical climate data for London preserved at Historical Weather Events. All of northern Europe was afflicted by a terrible cold snap and a poor singlewoman of London such as Mary would have been particularly vulnerable to the winter’s chill.

So go and check out the latest additions to London Lives – there’s a lot of new history that we’re uncovering every day.

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