The mad writer
Your humble blogger will be spending the last days of this month wrestling with his nearly-completed book manuscript on global economic governance during the Great Recession. To those readers who aspire to write books, this must sound very glamorous. To those readers who have actually written books, however, you know the truth, and it’s about ...
Your humble blogger will be spending the last days of this month wrestling with his nearly-completed book manuscript on global economic governance during the Great Recession. To those readers who aspire to write books, this must sound very glamorous. To those readers who have actually written books, however, you know the truth, and it's about as far from glamorous as one can get.
Your humble blogger will be spending the last days of this month wrestling with his nearly-completed book manuscript on global economic governance during the Great Recession. To those readers who aspire to write books, this must sound very glamorous. To those readers who have actually written books, however, you know the truth, and it’s about as far from glamorous as one can get.
There are piles of paper everywhere in my office. Some of those piles have been undisturbed for weeks, but some get torn apart as I search frantically for that article that has that telling piece of data that I can put into that chapter and where the f**k is that article anyway??!! Some of those piles hide crumb-filled plates and coffee mugs that should have been cleaned out days ago. I have something like forty different tabs of .pdfs, spreadsheets, word processing documents and web pages open on my computer, and all of them are necessary. My exercise and sleep regimens are shot to hell. With declining amounts of natural energy, my coffee and sugar intakes have spiked, as has my waistline. Maybe, just maybe, all of this is making me crabbier than usual with my friends and family. I’ve been avoiding most face-to-face intercourse for the past few weeks so I can get this goddamn thing done. And all of this for a manuscript that, one-third of the time, makes me think, "what a steaming pile of horseshit."
So, to sum up, this is the place where I’m at right now:
Now, to be fair, two-thirds of the time I do think, "hey, I think I’ve got something here!" And there’s a certain satisfaction that will come when I press "send" and this manuscript wings its way to my editor and publisher. My point, however, is that things like books and dissertations require a fair amount of sweat, anguish, and fortitude. So when someone claims to have done something like this when they really haven’t, it pisses me off to no end.
My other point is that I’m a wee bit busy at the moment, so blogging will be light until August rolls around.
Daniel W. Drezner is a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and co-host of the Space the Nation podcast. Twitter: @dandrezner
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