I have had one of those days that makes me want to run away and never ever be in charge of anything again.

That is all.

Week 1 status report:

– Classes are overflowing, but the overflow seems to have ebbed a bit, at least in one of them.

– 4500 words written on new article draft; 1000ish words written on “book” proposal draft.

– Excitement about classes and writing projects has not abated.

– Nonetheless, I’m really, really happy it’s the weekend.

Have a good one, all.

I had one of those moments earlier this week, in which I suddenly felt as though the fog had lifted and everything I’d been muddling through for the last year or so became clear. I’m really hoping that this clarity isn’t temporary — I’m hoping I’m actually onto something — but I’m extremely excited about it right now. And I’m hoping that writing about it here will help make the thing that I’m thinking a bit more real.

Here’s the backstory: for the last couple of years, as those of you who’ve been hanging around here know, I’ve been writing a good bit about the future of scholarly publishing, producing a range of blog posts, manifestos, and even a couple of full-on articles. And they’ve been exciting to produce, and they’ve led to a certain kind of awareness of my work in the field that hadn’t existed before. But I wasn’t sure how much work they were doing for me, in a long-range sense. And here’s where a kind of craven careerism creeps into my thinking about my work: I need to be working on a project of the sort that one would call a “book,” not least because the second book is pretty much key to full professordom around these parts, or if not key, then certainly something somewhere well above helpful.

But I’ve been having a couple of problems with thinking about a large second project. The first is that such a project, in a lot of ways, is diametrically opposed to the manifestos and articles I’ve been producing, all of which have been arguing about various aspects of the problem that the book poses for the future of academic discourse; to be making those arguments while working on a book has felt more than a little hypocritical, and counterproductive to my real goals for the academy. And the second is that I’ve tested out a number of different ideas for that second project, and while the one I spent the summer working on seems like it will eventually come to fruition, it’s just not evolved enough yet. And every article or manifesto I’ve written has taken time away from that big project, and has made its full evolution seem that much more remote.

So when I decided this week to reinstitute the half-hour focused morning writing sessions, I had to figure out what exactly it was I was going to work on. I’ve got an article that I’m interested in writing toward that projected next big project, but I’m really not ready to launch into it. On the other hand, I’ve got another article on the future of scholarly publishing — the peer review article I mentioned a couple of posts back — that I also want to work on, and that I have the sense could be put together fairly quickly.

So I spent the first day of morning writing blocking out that article — writing the introduction, laying out the sections, figuring out how to proceed — and was very pleased with the results. And then later in the day, while thinking about something else entirely, it suddenly hit me (and with such a force that I honestly can’t believe this hadn’t occurred to me sooner):

What if all this writing about scholarly publishing is the next “book” project?

A flood of questions followed right behind that: What would the overall argument of such a project be? How would it be structured? What pieces of such a project are already in place, and what yet needs to be figured out?

And most importantly: Is the project a book, or a “book”?

I’m pretty rapidly figuring out the answers to those questions, and I’m hoping to share some of those answers here soon. In the meantime, though, I wanted to share this much: there have been few joys in my career thus far quite comparable to the moment — and I’ve now had it on four separate occasions — of realizing that all the random stuff I was doing, often not sure why I was doing it, was adding up to something coherent, and that that something coherent could actually, possibly, be really good.

I believe that this may be my most fun semester ever.* My schedule includes, on the English side of my appointment, my Race, Gender, and Science Fiction course, and on the Media Studies side, my Introduction to Digital Media Studies course. And, just for good measure, I’m teaching an overload course at the graduate school, in the School of Information Systems and Technologies, on Digital Media Theory. So I’m all geeky, all the time, this semester, and one day in, at least, it’s completely awesome.

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*I mean, the most fun since that semester that I taught the class that you were in, oh lurking former student. Of course.

Day 2 has not gone, shall we say, as well as day 1 did. This is primarily due to the fact that I woke up at 2 am, a bit sick and completely unable to go back to sleep. (Yes, the time stamp on the last post is accurate.) Focus is not high this morning, and the chances for gym action are pretty much nil. That said, I did manage to do a bit more tinkering with drafting the new article, and am hopeful that I’ll be able to move it a little further forward tomorrow.

Yesterday morning, as part of the new regime, I sat down and did half an hour of uninterrupted, undistracted writing, beginning the process of blocking out the new article I’m working on, focusing on the history and future of peer review. And not a moment too soon, apparently. This morning, via the Chronicle (and if:book) comes the announcement of Noah Wardrip-Fruin’s peer-review experiment: Noah’s publishing his book manuscript, Expressive Processing: Digital Fictions, Computer Games, and Software Studies, in a modified version of CommentPress on the Grand Text Auto blog, at the same time his editor, Doug Sery, sends it out for traditional peer review.

Noah’s interest in this experiment has its origins in his desire to have as his primary peer reviewers the social network that has developed around his blog, feeling certain that those readers are the ones who will provide the greatest insight into his project. Doug Sery, for his part, agreed, while remaining somewhat skeptical:

He insisted on running the manuscript through the traditional peer-review process as well. “We are a peer-review press—we’re always going to want to have an honest peer review,” says Mr. Sery, senior editor for new media and game studies. “The reputation of MIT Press, or any good academic press, is based on a peer-review model.”

The origins of that “traditional” model of peer review, its presumptions of honesty, and the lock that it has on current models of academic authority are precisely the subject of the article I’m now working on, so I’m looking forward to watching Noah’s experiment develop. I’m also watching with great anticipation to see what this experiment bodes for MediaCommons, where we hope to develop a new model of “peer-to-peer review” that might not simply exist alongside traditional blind peer review but in fact augment and surpass it as a mode of creating and measuring authority in the age of the network.

The spring semester doesn’t start until tomorrow, but today’s the first day of the new regime: I got up early, I’m sitting at the computer for half an hour of focused writing (though I’ll admit that I did sneak a peek at my email, but didn’t actually respond to any of it), and later this morning I’m going to the gym. The essence of the new regime is pretty simple: I’m laying off of some of the bad-for-me stuff that I’ve been doing, and trying to build in more good-for-me stuff.

The good news is that, if I stick to it, it’ll likely take; I tend to respond well to discipline, and can really get into the swing of it once it’s in place. The bad news is that when my discipline breaks down, I have a tendency to go totally off the rails, wallowing in a way that progressively undermines everything that makes me feel good about myself in a long-range sense, in favor of things that will make me feel good right now.

So: this morning I turn over a new leaf. Somehow that metaphor has lost something in the digital, as I’ve got neither a calendar page nor a journal page to turn. But nonetheless: a new semester, a new regime, and a new blog post to mark the moment.

I spent a big chunk of yesterday (and will be spending a similar chunk of today) conducting a series of interviews via video conferencing, and I’m having one of those, “well, duh” moments: video interviews are different from phone interviews, because you can see the subject. And she can see you.

Despite how much of a tech-junkie I am, I’ve resisted video interviews until now, partially because of the many glitches I encountered in my few previous attempts to use the form, and partially because of my own overdeveloped self-consciousness (for a deeper understanding of the functioning of which one might see the ‘why the videophone failed’ section of Infinite Jest). And for both of those reasons, I’m stunned by how well yesterday went — I feel as though I have a much better sense of the folks I was talking to than I would have gotten otherwise.

The technology is still imperfect, and I wouldn’t exactly call it the next best thing to being there, but it’s better than I expected, and it’s better than the phone.

I’m still processing my responses to yesterday’s Macworld Stevenote and the announcement of the MacBook Air. On the one hand, a super-lightweight portable computer seems to me a great niche for Apple to move into. On the other hand, this one is almost too focused on lightweight portability for me. It would be a fantastic travel machine, but not so great for working on day in and day out: not enough storage, not enough ports, not enough screen real estate.

Which makes me begin to suspect that Apple has opened a new front in consumer electronics marketing, as of yesterday: not upgrade-your-current-computer but instead buy-a-second-machine. After all, if you’re going to take advantage of things like Remote Disc, you’ve got to have another machine nearby. And if you’re going to use wireless networking for everything including backups, you’ve got to have a Time Capsule. So the digital hub seems increasingly to be throwing out new spokes, producing not a convergence of appliances but instead appliance proliferation.

I held off on replacing my 12″ PowerBook G4 until now, hoping that I’d want to replace it with something new and sexy. And I do, as it turns out: I want to replace it with a 24″ iMac and a MacBook Air. But until I get some grant that will allow me to do so, it looks like I’m going to be getting the same MacBook Pro I’d have gotten last month instead. Ah, well.

I’m off to the eye doctor, foax, which doesn’t bode well for the old productivity today. I’ll be spending part of what remains of the day in a meeting, and the rest of it trying to ignore the increasingly loud ticking of the clock. More later, I hope, when I can see the keyboard again.