Loomings

The chapter draft is officially due August 31st. Yikes! I talked to Bryan last week, and he thought it was a better idea to get the chapter done before thinking about the article which is good in terms of how I've been thinking, and bad in terms of my own anxiety. I'm going to spend this week getting organized for the writing process, get some index cards and start making more concise notes in addition to getting a bit more reading in. In terms of blogging, I'm going to try to discipline my prose. The bad thing about writing before I'm ready is I tend to meander into these incoherent and horribly overwritten paragraphs. I wonder if I'll ever get a chance to develop an elegant prose style. For the time being, if I can't be elegant, I'm going to try to clean and concise.

Instead of sectioning the chapter by text, I'm going to section it by trope: the geography of the swamp, the figure of the insurrectionist/mutineer, and ships and ocean travel. This will allow me to circle back to texts more organically instead of doing rigid and plodding juxtapositions text by text. The hope is that: A) I won't have to force the connections between the texts if I cluster them like this, and B) by keeping these three things in mind I can keep the maritime aspects front and center.

Because of my tendency to think backwards it also helps if I start with something like Dred and then reach back to her source material and work my way forward. It makes me wonder if I shouldn't have started the last chapter from Equiano and worked my way backward to Grainger. Oh well, hindsight and everything.