Every day so far this week has been spackled with meetings: two dissertation committee metings, one of which I was chairing; a faculty training session regarding an overhaul of general education requirements; a meeting of the arts & sciences mentoring program.
In between the meetings, I've been writing my syllabi (or, to be more accurate, revising my syllabi, since I've taught both of the courses before), organizing existing secondary texts for my grad seminar, and reviewing potential replacement secondary texts that might or might not be newer/better than some of the ones I have. I'm planning to give students several options by which they can access these texts--they can either read/Xerox them in the library as a print text on reserve, or download/print them onto any computer via clickable links on the official course blog. (And some of them are already available online in the university's subscription research databases.) This means, though, that I have a fair bit of scanning that I'm going to need to do for the course. It will be a good time investment, though, because once in place, I can easily reuse them, and it will be much more time efficient and cost effective than having to make copies or assemble a course packet.
Today, I completely reorganized my cartoon porn bookshelves into a more logical and user-friendly system and now, barring the systematic overhauling of my filing system, my office rehabbing is officially "done." I also drafted up an invite letter inviting a Big Deal Writer to come to campus, and prepared a sample syllabus (for a course I'm not teaching this semester) and preliminary notes/strategies on behalf of the creative writing faculty in preparation for the general education requirements overhaul.
Furthermore, I met my new faculty mentee (and her husband) today, as I was asked to serve as a mentor in the college of arts & sciences mentoring program. They were both just delightful--funny, smart, interesting.
What I haven't been able to get accomplished, however, is any of my own writing, and after having been doing that full time all throughout the past year, I've been feeling a little sick in the pit of my stomach over it. My fear, I suppose, is that once I get sucked back into the academic grind (which a part of me obviously really enjoys), I'll find that I barely have any time to write. I've made a promise to myself, though, to do less squeezing of my writing schedule to fit into my academic schedule, and more squeezing of my academic schedule to fit into my writing schedule for a change.
