It's a truth universally acknowledged that the best Emma AU is and will always be Clueless, but for quite a bit I've been thinking that the closest modern equivalent to "three or four families in a country village" (one of Austen's tongue-in-cheek descriptions of her own preferred subject) might in fact be the members of a university English ( Read more... )

After deciding, totally on a whim (and with far less forethought than I should have invested in it) to follow a friend's challenge to create something every day for the month of March, I started thinking a lot about what it means, for me, to MAKE something, and how that's changed over the past few years.

I'm pretty sure I always knew I wanted to be ( Read more... )

Today, I did a fair amount of planning work on the first paper for one of my seminars. I wrote up a lot of notes about it on my academic Dreamwidth account, if anyone really wants to read about thoughts on late-17th/early-18th-century women's writing and the creation of virtual or actual female homosociality, but I don't blame you if you don't.

Now ( Read more... )

I mentioned in my last post that I've been reading Dorothy Sayers for the first time (and kicking myself throughout, because HOW have I never read Sayers before?). I started with Strong Poison about two weeks ago at the recommendation of 
( Read more... )

Finally did the full read-through of 2011's NaNo-novel, Chasing Ghosts, and ugh. I am actually a little too in love with it. I have this overwhelming feeling that there are tons of things wrong with it (the plot structure totally rips off large chunks of Possession, I have not read enough eighteenth-century private correspondence to know what ( Read more... )

I know it's early to be making this list but if it doesn't get made now it may never actually happen!

1. Find a letterpress studio where I can take a few classes, get back in the hang of working with type, and then use their presses/studio space outside of class time, all for a reasonable fee.
2. Find some community/forum/real-life workshop where I can ( Read more... )

 That's it. That's the whole entry. Must save all words for seminar papers. Goodbye, internet; goodbye, sleep; hello, coffee!

(But like seriously who said this was okay I distinctly remember there being more days than this between now and when the first paper is due, I PROTEST.)
This entry was originally posted at http://readingredhead.dreamwidth. ( Read more... )

I had two opportunities to talk about writing today with writers, which is really weird and unusual and lovely and should happen more often. Both of these too-brief conversations were held before the beginning of a class, and inevitably there were other (non-writer) people listening. In my Clarissa seminar the guy who sits across from me noticed my ( Read more... )

There is something about me that is physically opposed to the notion of revision.

My brain is wholly aware that being given the opportunity to re-work or even entirely re-write a paper is absolutely incredible. It means learning from and correcting the mistakes of an earlier draft, and ultimately producing a stronger, sleeker, better paper in the ( Read more... )