Book Revision Progress Report

Back at the beginning of summer, I posted about working on my book. My book has a planned seven chapters about scientists in nineteenth-century British fiction. These cover:

1. Frankenstein
2. Wives and Daughters
3. medical reform novels
4. domestic fiction
5. air-war novels
6. novels of biocracy
7. professionalized scientists

Plus there's an introduction, and I think I might do a coda.

I have materials drafted for every chapter, because it's based on my dissertation. I've been rewriting for a depressingly long time now, longer than I wrote it to begin with! My original plan was to start with the chapters that needed the most work and work my way down. This didn't quite happen because I wanted to have good sample chapters to send to publishers-- and then this thing always happens where I sit down to work on a chapter and decide it needs even more work than I imagined, and so revising it takes ages. But so far this is where I am at and where I am going:

CHAPTER 2
I did this one first because I knew it needed the least amount of work, and I wanted to use it in any samples. I did this so long ago I don't even remember when. Finished Summer 2019.

CHAPTER 4
This is one I thought wouldn't require a lot of work... and then it did! Part of the problem is that it contained some material I wrote as a second-year M.A. student... it just was not up to standard. It took me a long time to figure out the chapter's trajectory, too; I kept reorganizing it. Also I adapted part of it into an article, and then when I put the material from the article back into the chapter, I had to update everything else to match. And then I added a whole novel to it! So it was a lot of work, but I would say it paid off. Finished Summer 2019.

CHAPTER 3
This one I knew would be a lot of work, and it was a lot of work. One issue is that it was long; it is my chapter that takes in Middlemarch, and it is hard to write anything short about Middlemarch. Another was that I didn't have a solid sense of argument, and so there was a lot of back-and-forth and reorganizing as I worked my way into one. (My mode of writing is typically to write something, reverse outline it, reorganize it, and then add what is missing in its new trajectory.) Again, I ended up really happy with it; I think I managed to say something interesting about a novel a lot of people have written about. That said, I didn't cut as much as I hoped, but I am saying more than I was. Finished Summer 2020.

CHAPTER 6
This is the one I have been working on this summer. Again, it was one I knew would be a lot of work. I dropped one novel and replaced it with another; my dissertation version had almost no secondary sources, so I had to do a lot of research. But just this Tuesday I have a complete draft in its new form. Again, it has a focused argument that it didn't have before, and it draws attention to some obscure novels that I think are really worth discussing. I have some small things to add, and I need to sit down and read it all at once to make sure it coheres, but finishing it up should take no more than a couple days. (Almost) Finished Summer 2021.

CHAPTER 1
This one will be my last "lot of work" chapters. The main issues, as I recall, are that I am drawing a connection between Frankenstein and a book I haven't actually read much of, so I will need to do that, and that I didn't really come to grips with the vast, vast amount of work out there on Frankenstein. I actually tried to omit Frankenstein from my dissertation but one of my committee members told me no one could write a book about nineteenth-century scientists in literature and skip Frankenstein! And yes, she is right, and I do have something to say about it. But boy I am not looking forward to it.

CHAPTER 5
This one I don't think should be much work. It's largely based on preexisting, published material, about which I feel pretty good... I think! My opinion always changes once I sit down and reread in order to rewrite.

CHAPTER 7
This one may be slightly more work than 5, so I might switch it around if I still believe "amount-of-work" is the sequence for this. The main thing is that I don't think I had strong engagement with secondary sources on professionalization. But I now know of a couple things I could cite and work with, building on work I did in Chapter 4. The other issue is I think each of the three novels it discusses was originally discussed in a different chapter (two in 4, and one in 5/6) so it probably doesn't have a consistent throughline.

INTRODUCTION
This clearly gets written last, because it has to set up everything I went on to do. But I remember being pretty happy with the conceit of the intro, so hopefully it is smooth sailing.

CODA
Does anyone actually read the codas to academic monographs? Doubtful, so I may give this a miss.

As you can see, I am working steadily but not quickly. I complete a good chapter revision every summer... but if that continues to be my m.o., I will not finish this until Summer 2025! And okay, I have been working with this as a book since 2018, and as a dissertation since 2013, and as a thing I was writing about in coursework since 2010! So it would be nice to be rid of it all, and work on something else. I don't think I have the loathing for my project I sometimes hear people describe, but I am ready to move on emotionally.

So my goal for the coming year is to actually work on my project while teaching, which will definitely be an easy thing to do while teaching four comp classes per semester and raising two kids.