Clever readers will infer from the subject line which magazine just bought a story of mine.

I'm working on my last article for the reproductive health encyclopedia I'm contributing to. This one's on the cultural impact of the Betty Freidan's The Feminine Mystique. I'm blanking. I can't believe it. This book is the book that launched the Second Wave of American feminism. Without it, there would arguably be no NOW, no ERA, no Roe v. Wade. No Title IX, no Take Your Daugher to Work Day, no Ms. Magazine. No Bikini Kill, no Buffy the Vampire Slayer, no safe and legal abortion, no safe and legal birth control for women. There would have been no Gloria Steinem, no Andrea Dworkin, no Lavender Menace. No Toys in Babeland or Good Vibrations. No equal pay for equal work (well, we're still working on that one.) No Women's Studies departments, no rape legislation reform, no Vagina Monologues.

And I can't come up with 850 words on the mother text of the movement I fight so hard for.

WTF?

I need to do some writing today. Having a hard time getting started. I was supposed to have jury duty today, but was able to get another postponement. I've been sick off and on for the last week, and needed a bit of downtime to recover. Bun's got the same crud today, so there's been a lot of sleeping, eating soup, and general lounging today. But now I need to get to work. I have so much to do in the next few weeks and I know that if I don't get a jump on it, I'm going to be in a serious world of hurt.

The job search is in wait mode at the moment. I'm going to put some more applications in, but I know that several of the searches I'm really interested in will be putting out their shortlists in the next week or so. So there's a bit of waiting game going on now. Nothing else from the place I interviewed with on Friday, but they are on spring break so I don't expect to hear anything for a week or so after they return, to give the committee time to meet. I'm feeling fairly calm about the whole thing at the moment. I expect that will change several times over the next weeks, but as for now I'm feeling Ok. It will all somehow work out. I'll be glad when I get my employment settled so that I can put my energy into something else.

I have some time away coming soon, which will be welcome. I really need to get out of my regular life for a few days, just to recharge and get some perspective.

But now I have to get motivated to write about the cultural importance of The Feminine Mystique. In 850 words.

Seriously.

Probably of very little interest to anyone outside of the area in question, so skip it if you wish...

( Houston, can you hear me? )

ETA: My awesome ILL librarian actually got ahold of a copy! And boy is it a piece of propaganda/crap! But I have it and can use it for my article, so it's all good.

...but it worked last time, and I not only got the book, but I got fritterfae out of the deal, so it's worth a try...

Does anyone on my lovely Flist have a copy of the book The Uterine Crisis by Ilya Sandra Perlingieri that you'd be willing to let me babysit for a week or two? I'll send it back to you very quickly. I need it for an article I'm writing for a reproductive health encyclopedia, and I'm having a nightmare of a time finding it. I've put in an ILL request with my university, but she's also not finding it quickly anywhere.

So...anyone?

..this time of mixed nature.

Harvard says "no" to my fellowship application. It sounds like my proposal made it through several rounds of the selection process, so if I don't end up in something tenure-track I may resubmit next year with some tweaking. It's too bad, but that's a competitive fellowship, and that's just the way it goes.

Oberlin sent a nice "we got your stuff" letter with the Affirmative Action form. I don't read too much into this -- some places are required by state law to send you the EEOC form, other places only send them to people they want to explore further, and there's no way of telling what's true for a particular institution. So I'll fill it out and send it back and see what happens. It would be a cool job, not teaching but doing programming for the LGBT community on campus which would be rewarding in its own way.

Job boards bring several new opportunities, mostly at Women's Centers or in the women's programming/LGBTQ programming sphere. I'm thinking this might not be a bad deal for a couple years while I write, especially since the project I'm currently ruminating on has more to do with queer studies and less to do with paganism. Queer studies is a hot commodity right now and I have some good data and ideas that I think will have more intellectual currency than the pagan stuff. There are a couple teaching positions out there, as well, that are worth throwing my hat in for. It only costs the stamp or the time to email, so it's silly not to throw another hook in the water.

A couple of applied positions have also come through my Inbox, and I'm considering working in the nonprofit arena if the academia thing doesn't pan out right now, and if the right position comes along. I have two that are worth applying for so far.

Worst case, I can likely go to work for a publisher as an editor or proofer. Not a dream job, but the fact is that I am very good at working with texts, and I have lots of experience working with proofs and galleys from all these years with The Boss. So if I had to put my head down for a year or two and pick up the blue proofer's pencil, I would be fine. I can think of alot worse things, and if nothing else working in publishing would teach me a lot about the proces and keep a fire under me to publish my own work.

Waiting to hear back from journal about the article abstract I submitted. They sound interested, but I am sure they will have many submissions and they have to pick pieces that will work well together as a volume. I need to stay hands-off with the article until I hear -- it's standard to only submit to one journal at a time, and I don't want to spend a bunch of time working on the article only to have to go back and make changes for the journal that accepts it later. So I'm thinking of other projects.

I feel alternately sad and deflated and incredibly optimistic about the job search. Maybe it's too much King Cake for dessert at lunch today.

October 15 is my first major job/fellowship application deadline. Eep. I guess I know what I'm doing with any "spare time" I can wring out of the next four or five days!

Eep. I'm going to send out my first article for consideration by a peer-reviewed journal this week. I should have been doing this for at least a year now, but there you go. I'm revising a conference paper that I was pretty proud of, so I feel pretty good that someone will take it. Now I just have to stop fiddling with it once I get the new information and data integrated and get it proofed, and just get the damn thing in the mail. I hate that I can't email it in, but I guess is this part of the process, eh?

It's all part of the bigger process of trying to get my career back on track.

( In which our heroine navel gazes )

Ok, I've identified four likely University presses for the next round of submissions. I'm not stopping with these four, mind you, they are just the ones that are at the top of the list to get materials next. I love it when they require only short proposals, and I love it even more when they provide forms :)

For those who've published their dissertations...did you revise a sample chapter for your proposal, or just send a dissertation chapter with the standard, "While this will need revision to fit with a broader audience, this chapter provides a glimpse of my writing style" note? I'm wondering how much revision to do to the diss before the thing's even accepted somewhere, but at the same time want to give my baby the best possible chances of being adopted. My dissertation's not too "dissertation-y," but I also know that I'll need to tone down some of the dissertation-ease to make it work as a book, and there are pieces of it that were required by The Committee that won't need to be in the final project.

My book proposal is now in the hands of the social science editor at a major press in the UK.

I had sent it via hardcopy a couple weeks ago, but it apparently got lost in their internal mail system, so they asked me to resubmit via email.

It's like handing my kid over to someone. 

The Girl is working on a paper for her Visual Anthropology class examining the construction of female identity in Metal (music) culture. She's looking at how women feel about the depiction of women in various types of metal, how they feel about themselves, what they find appealing about metal, what they find troubling about it, etc. She needs to do some interviews. These can be done online or in person.

If you'd like to help, please email metalchickstudy@gmail.com

Ideally, this is the basis of a project we will do together looking at the sometimes uneasy relationship women have with metal and feminism, not unlike the tension that exists between hiphop and feminism. It's nascent at best, and on the back burner until she does this paper.

Time if of the essence, and any and all responses are appreciated. Fans of all genres of metal are welcomed, though those who are or were fans of hair metal and 80s metal are especially eagerly sought.  

Postdoc application for Rice is complete. Now I just gotta print it off on The Boss's superfast laser printer tomorrow and get that sucker in the mail. I feel good about this one. I guess we'll find out how good come 15 Feb when the two appointments are announced. 

...it's been a month since I posted. It's been two weeks since I read the Flist. Update coming in the next day or so, Flist catching up happening all this week. It's been a dramatic, traumatic, non-good-time over here :)

But for now...

I'm looking for someone with a decent collection of sourcebooks for Werewolf: The Apocalypse (yes, the RPG) that they'd let me play with for a while. Preferably someone in the DFW area, and preferably someone who has a collection that goes all the way back to the first edition. No, I'm not running a game, I'm working up a paper proposal on the use of Goddess worship and NeoPaganism in the game. I especially need the main source book, but any supplementary materials (particularly on the Black Furies) would also be helpful.

If you can point me to websites that is also great.

It's been several years since I played. (Hell if there's a game going on in the DFW area I'd be willing to sit in and play...)

Comment here or email me at dakotawitch at gmail dot com

I know, I know....I'm sorry, I'll update more often, I promise....

So Summer II has come and gone, at that means my time at UTA has also come to a close. Tomorrow I go up and clean out my office, turn in my keys, and basically close that chapter of my life. I'll have some residual paperwork to tend to, and it's always possible they will call me for adjunct work in the future, but my days as a Visiting Assistant Prof there are done. It's all a little bittersweet, and I'm sure there will be a tear or two when I lock that office door for the last time. This has been a great job, even with the growing pains and the commute and the 8am classes. I'll miss this campus. I feel like I really got a taste of public university life, and I can make an informed decision as to what type of university environment is best for me.

Besides, without this job I wouldn't have met The Girl :)

A couple weeks ago The Boss (aka The Dean) called me and wanted to know if I had any downtime this summer. He's no longer The Dean, so he's going full-bore on the 1896 election book and he's chairing another faculty search. He offered to let me work from home and bring me on at my old rate. So I jumped at it. So far I'm not putting in all that many hours, but it's a small paycheck and it gives some structure to my working at home days, so I figure it's win-win. Besides, as much as I used to bitch, I really did love that job.

I got a tip that Moutain View College (part of the Dallas County Community College system) needs an emergency replacement for a cultural anthroplogy course, so I'm calling the guy tomorrow about that. I had a chat with him last week and he's excited about me, so we'll see. Pay's not great, but it's two days a week and it's good experience.

Otherwise, I'm taking what the unemployed academic euphemistically refers to "a gap year" to get the damn book published. I'm working on proposals for three separate presses, so we'll see who bites first. I will have the damned thing under contract to someone by the first of next year. Anything else is not an option.

I'm reading a couple of things to write reviews on, and I am trying to get some articles and such in the pipeline.

Personal life has been....oh, let's go with "challenging"...so I've not been as productive as I would have liked the last two months. Copious amounts of time crying in the fetal position are not highly compatible with intellectual acheivement. I'll talk about it all here eventually, but I'm not ready to do it now. 

And with that, I'm back to the book proposal...

...but does anyone out there have a copy of Arthur Evans's Witchcraft and the Gay Counterculture they'd be willing to let me babysit for a couple weeks?

Also, anyone who has 1980s back issues of RFD (the Radical Faerie Journal) who would be willing to copy a couple articles?

I'm (obviously) working on a project. I'll reimburse for copies and postage, and will credit you in the acknowledgements when the article is eventually published.

Please comment here if you can help!

ETA: Looks like fritterfae may be able to hook me up with what I need. Thanks to all who commented, and I'll keep y'all posted on the progress of this project!

I will be in Boston May 3-5 for a conference at Harvard: "Forging Folklore: Witches, Pagans, and NeoTribal Cultures." I will be presenting a paper based on my dissertation research. Not sure where I'm staying yet, working that out this week. 

If anyone's in the area and interested in seeing me, drop me a comment here.