The Political Devil Summer Book Progress

I had a busy summer, and most of what I've publicly posted about has focused on my full time high school teaching job, and preparing for that.

I return to work Monday, so I thought I'd write a brief update on the book progress.

I started  planning and taking notes on ideas for the dissertation --> book revision as soon as I had a signed book contract. In fact, from November to the end of May, I did not "work" on the book. I had a busy year, and wanted some distance. What I DID do consistently was jot down notes in my notebook as they occurred to me. I had divided it into chapters, and as I thought of revisions, things to emphasize, articles to include, things to cut or refocus, I would jot them down. This means that when I sat down in May to reread the diss with an eye of making more detailed notes, I had a rough sketch of the revision project AND specific notes.

Once school was out at the end of May, I reread the diss, making detailed notes. By the time I finished I realized that I wouldn't just be revising what I had, I would be reorganizing and reimaginging.

Part of me "saw" the reorganization the whole time- the diss title was "Devilish Leaders, Demonic Parliaments, and Diabolical Rebellion: The Political English Devil from Malmesbury to Milton."
Yet the diss chapters each focused on an author.
So the first thing I did was reorganize according to these ideas.

I also knew that I needed to write a whole new chapter. SO, I planned out my work schedule. I planned on spending all of June on the new pamphlet chapter, because it would be the most work. It took a few days longer than I thought, but I'm super happy with it.

July was dedicated to starting the first reorganized chapter on devilish leaders.  At first, I thought I was going to talk about ALL the devilish leaders from the different works, but I realized (and again, I mention this in my intro) that while there is a lot of slippage between these works and characterizations, most  of these figures, these political devils are defined more by ONE thing than another. So it turned out that Malmesbury's devilish leaders are unique amongst all these political devils. So I focused just on that. But that doesn't mean that this chapter is the same as the diss. I cut whole sections that don't focus on the political devil, and this laser focus is a key difference from diss to book. I also expanded sections, close readings. The chapter is longer than the diss, despite these changes, and I'm a bit worried about the long chapters, but it's what's needed to do the work, so I'm not going to stress about it.

August was scheduled for doing the same process for the second chapter, on fiendish constructions. I actually finished the devilish leaders chapter early, so was able to copy, paste, and reorganize this chapter a couple of weeks ago. I also went through and cut, and inserted place markers where I need to write new material, answer questions, bridge ideas. I printed it out, with these blank spaces in it, and set it aside. I did not work on it at all this week, because I DO go back to work Monday, and felt like I needed to the time to rest, switch gears, and didn't want to do the work on the chapter distracted and have the work not be good.

I felt good doing this because I was ahead. There's not a lot of wriggle room- I will have to dig in next weekend, but I feel good about it. Whenever I start to doubt my plan I remind myself that I rewrote the diss from scratch in 5 months, and revised it in 6, only having partial weekends (I teach Saturday school) and school breaks to do it. And I was juggling a lot more after school responsibilities.

Now that school is back, I have weekends I'm not teaching Saturday school. This is how I rewrote the diss. I don't work on it during the week because teaching is exhausting, and it's too hard to switch gears. On the weekend I sit down right after Nehi's walk and am glued to my computer 7a-4 or 5p. Totally focused. I have the following schedule:

• August: Finish fiendish constructions chapter
• September: revise/reimagine satanic speech chapter
• October: revise/reimagine diabolical rebellion chapter
• November: rewrite/revise intro and conclusion
• December: read through and make throughline revisions of whole text
• January: send to editor

After the work I've done this summer, I feel really good about this. As I finish each chapter I feel like I have more and more confidence in how the whole work functions. The outlines have gotten tighter, I'm working the throughlines in AS I write, saving time later. One thing that's been really helpful was something my diss director had me do with the rewrite- I've started with really detailed outlines for each chapter. I sit and write the chapter with the outline in front of me. Once I've roughed out the chapter, I read through with the outline next to it and make sure the structure is there. This lets me see the pattern and form, and has been really helpful. This also means that as something comes up in one chapter, I have added it as a throughline to the other chapters' outlines. It has made a really big difference.

I've been putting bibliographies at the end of each chapter, making sure everything there is correct and in order, so in December I'll just copy and paste it all into one doc and remove the duplicates.

I will say, that with this revision, this reimagining, I have laughed and shrugged a lot about the mistakes in the diss. Some are silly- transposed numbers, odd citations. Some are big- ideas that I realized weren't fully fleshed out, arguments that don't follow through. The thing that has allowed me to not feel bad about these things, or cringe, or have negative feelings about the book is someone (I don't remember who) said to think of the dissertation as just the beginning of the conversation, not the end. That's a great way to think of it. I have some GREAT ideas in my diss. Some really interesting approaches for periodization and crossing boundaries. But what the book is letting me do is refine, focus, and highlight the BEST parts of this work.

I am really happy with this work. I wasn't sure I would be. I was worried when I started this summer that I wasn't going to be motivated because I'm writing as a high school English teacher, who may never get a higher ed job. So this is not a book for a job. Or for tenure. It is in every sense of the word a book just for me. My contribution to the field. A new look. New ideas. New approaches.

This has been freeing in a lot of ways. I've put back a lot of the folklore and interdisciplinary work I was told to take out, because this is my work and my voice, and if this is the only book I get to publish, I'm going to make sure it represents ME.

I am trying to focus more on sharing teaching documents, and that part of my life, so I don't know how much time or energy I'll have for posting book updates. I will try though as I can.