Parting Blurt

See, here is what I really don't believe.  I don't believe I can write a book in such brief, daily sessions.  Hundreds of blog posts?  Sure.  Thousands of lines in translation?  Working on it.*  But an actual, honest-to-goodness scholarly book?  Pull the other one, it's got bells on.

Plus--and this is the thought that came to me yesterday as I was walking home after writing my first twenty-minute post (yes, I am going to try to make this a regular exercise, see how terrified I am, I can't even admit it to you, much less myself that I'm doing it)--as this very sentence demonstrates, I'm a butterfly.  I hate sticking to developing one thought day after day after day.  It's the main reason (among others) that I like blogging so much: each post is a complete thought in itself, I don't need to come back to it day after day after day, rereading what I've written the day before in order to get back into the mood that I had before.  I can just write in the mood (and the voice) that I have for that day, perhaps comic, perhaps melancholy, perhaps confessional, perhaps declarative.

It changes.  But with academic prose, there is only one voice, day after day after day.  And don't even get me started on what it's like writing the footnotes.

And now I've spent an hour writing blog posts, when I should have been working on my translation. 

*Although, mind you, a year ago I didn't even believe that.  Just saying.

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