Ain't No Cure for the Wintertime Blues

There were a lot of January blues around - dark nights, dark mornings, perhaps, and a sense that with all the lurgies going around, no one quite had Christmas off, so batteries weren't recharged.

Myself, I feel a sense of unease.

The Pratchett book, despite being in existence, still has an administrative impact as I tie off loose ends.

Pretty well all the lectures I am giving are slightly rejigged versions of stuff delivered in the past. Whilst it's good to be in this position - there's a sense of something missing. Even the new courses modules which I airlift into have old lectures zapped in the microwave. The essay questions conflate those set in the past.

I'm coasting.

And then in the research side of life, I have 120,000 words to copy edit and play with, and the job is not as straight forward as it should have been. One of the things I'm trying to do is bring it all in line with the supplied style guide - which most people seem to ignored or maybe haven't seen - only I'm finding inconsistencies. Abbreviate numbers 211-2, but they mention the 1914-18 war, which probably should be 1914-8. Ect. Ect.

I also need to reread a book for a corrected edition - oh yes, and the deadline is now a month earlier. Chiz.

I need to read a pile of submissions.

I've been shuffling bits of paper around to programme a conference.*

We're having meetings to achieve research clustery goodness. Bestill my beating heart. I've been here before.

Old wine. Old bottles.

I need to write that paper on comedy - especially as by this time next week I will have delivered it. I need to rewrite the ICFA paper on queer YASF to deliver at work - but given work's attitude to related issues I'm not convinced we aren't being used. I've heard tell that things are becoming more liberal but I'm wary. I probably owe someone a paper on Mieville. There's two chapters to draft for separate projects, and three to draft for a third.

I need to get my mojo back. I can't afford to wallow in boredom, which I suspect is what it is.

I felt productive on Saturday, but I still lost large parts of the day. And, foreseeing a room catastrophe waiting to happen next week, I'm now up too late and risk losing tomorrow morning to sleep.

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* "Negotiating the Mediascape: Theory and Practice Interchange in Contemporary Media" since you asked.

Reading VIII-IX

VIII: Peter Robinson, Wednesday's Child (1992?)
IX: Peter Robinson, Dry Bones That Dream (1994?)

Two more Inspector Banks novels - three more to read and then a stand-alone. Of the ones I have anyway. The copyright dates seem odd on these - I suspect they are of the British publication in the mid-1990s, whereas the ones above are Canadian (or the ones Wikipedia give), but don't necessarily mesh with those on Robinson's website.

In Wednesday's Child two people pose as social workers to kidnap a young child and a corpse in found in a disused mine. It wouldn't be a crime novel if the two weren't connected, would it? I get the sense that Robinson doesn't quite trust his readers to pay attention - he reminds us who Jenny the psychologist who Banks nearly had an affair with twice in a dozen pages. But holds attention.

Dry Bones That Dream brings back Dick Burgess, the London cop from A Necessary Death as a rather dull accountant is executed. The accountant turns out to have a second, secret life in Leeds, and to be tied in with international money laundering. The gimmick is pinched from a Sherlock Holmes novel, but I didn't see it coming. The narrative has a bit of political bite, and effort at a story arc is being made; Banks's family develops.

One of the minor cops reads Philip K. Dick and Roger Zelazny.