Three Weeks from Today

The countdown continues: three weeks from today (gasp!) I start driving to my new life in Indiana.

The main thing on my before-I-go list right now is revisions on a scholarly paper I sent off to an edited collection last month. I have the editor's comments back, and I have to say that I have a LOT of work to do on this one to make it more "scholarly" and more rigorously argued. It's a bit overwhelming, but I dutifully trotted off to the CU library yesterday and came home with two bulging totebags of books so that I can stick in footnotes all over the place! This is the paper that I already knew was skimpy and pitiful. So now I will make it substantial and insightful. I simply ran out of time before the due date, so I'm paying for that now.

I saw a book once with the great title: If You Haven't Got the Time to Do It Right, When Will You Find the Time to Do It Over? So it might seem that I've been dealt the procrastinator's punishment: because I ran out of time to do this paper right, now I have to spend twice as much time to do it over.

But that really isn't how I look at it. I don't think I really knew HOW to do it right the first time around. I really did need the editor's comments to point me in the right direction. And now I have those comments. I could have sat paralyzed forever trying to figure out how to do it right. Instead at least I wrote SOMETHING, and sent it off, and suffered the embarrassment of reading those editorial comments. I can tell the editor thinks it's really touch-and-go at this point whether my paper will end up making the cut.

But you know what? I bet it does. I always end up having to "do it over." There was one time, a year ago, when I just couldn't do it over, couldn't make the paper good enough, and had to give up on it. But all of the other times, dozens of times, I've come through.

Off to see if I can come through once more.