I’ve added some new material to the site this week — pages containing my CV and an overview of my teaching experience at UT. I’m afraid this site needs to be all things to all people: a useful source of information about Alcestis and about me for readers interested in the book, a professional web presence, a place to point search committees considering my applications for teaching positions.

And, also, you know, not boring.

In the interest of not being boring, I’ve also slimmed down the number of other pages on the site a bit. My old summer reading lists (from 2006 and 2007) have gone private, though you can still ponder my book preferences on Goodreads if that’s your thing — I never did manage to go back and add many books read before I joined the site, but I’m reasonably good about updating it because I love the idea of Goodreads so much. (And because I sometimes look at reader reviews of my book, fine, I admit it.)

I’m going to try to keep up the pace of posting I managed through most of the spring and early summer, or something approaching it. I’m officially on fellowship now, though, and my main goal needs to be to follow Dear Sugar’s advice. That means I really should not be spending time looking at beautiful fake Criterion DVD covers or watching Joseph Gordon-Levitt insist to the world that you make him feel like a natural woman. It also means that I may go quiet here occasionally. But I’ve really enjoyed blogging more regularly this year, and with the paperback release of Alcestis coming up in February, I hope to continue to have plenty to say.

A quick followup to my recent post about hack writers: this story, from the New Yorker’s Book Bench blog, about a woman writer setting up “a small letter-writing stand in Union Square.”

She sat behind a small Lettera typewriter and a cardboard menu listing your options: you had to first chose your language (English or Spanish), type of letter (regular letter for $2, love letter for $3, illicit love letter for $5, postage included), and type of paper (blue, yellow, or onion). Some customers sat down in the chair opposite her and dictated a letter in full; most gave her a few key bullet points and let her abstract the rest. A man stopped by to discuss a business inquiry he was working on—Hofer said she would write it later and send it to him by e-mail.

Compare this to an advertisement written by Laetitia Pilkington, one of the subjects of my dissertation, about her own letter-writing abilities:

If any illiterate Divine, from Cambridge or Oxford, has a Mind to shew his Parts in a London Pulpit, let him repair to me, and he shall have a Sermon, not stolen from Barrow, Tillotson, or other eminent Preachers, as is frequently the Practice, with those who have Sense enough to do it; but Fire-new from the Mint. If any Painter has a Mind to commence Bard without Wit, and join the Sister Arts, I also will assist him. If any Author wants a Copy of commendatory Verses, to prefix to his Work, or a flattering Dedication, to a worthless Great Man; any poor Person, a Memorial or Petition, properly calculated to dissolve the Walls of Stone and Flint which inviron the Hearts of rich men, Prelates in particular; any Print-seller, Lines to put under his humorous, comic, or serious Representations; any Player an occasional Prologue or Epilogue; any Beau a handsome Billetdoux, from a fair Incognita; any old Maid, a Copy of Verses in her Praise; any Lady, of high Dress, and low Quality, such as are generally the Ladies of the Town, an amorous melting delicate Epistle; any Projector a Paragraph in Praise of his Scheme [Ed. note: LP, the original promiscuous blurber!] ; any extravagant Prodigal, a Letter of Recantation to his Honoured Father; any Minister of State, an Apology for his Conduct, which those Gentlemen frequently want; any Undertaker a Funeral Elegy; or any Stone-Cutter an Epitaph; or, in short, any Thing in the Poetical Way; shall be dispatched in the most private, easy, and genteel Manner by applying to me, and that at the most reasonable Rates.

The New Yorker blogger calls this ghostwriting, but I hope the writer setting up her stand in Union Square wouldn’t mind being called a hack, particularly if that meant she could claim literary allegiance with someone as saucy as Mrs. Pilkington.

See accompanying image for an illustration of what the oncoming semester feels like.

I’m just about done prepping a new class — an intro English lit class, “Women’s Popular Genres” — and I’ve finished my wonderful two-year internship at the Harry Ransom Center, where I worked in the Public Services department.  I’m finishing up my first dissertation chapter, trying to stay on top of the book world, writing fellowship applications, and awaiting a galley copy of my first academic publication, which needs marking up. Among other things. Have I mentioned how hot this summer has been in Austin? Only twelve million times? Sorry.

The other thing I’ve done recently is race through Tana French’s first two books, In the Woods and The Likeness. My mother sent me the first one and I stayed up till one-thirty on the night before my last day at the Ransom Center in order to finish it and read so fast I gave myself a headache. I actually enjoyed The Likeness even more, though, and not just because of French’s marvelously well-done homage to Donna Tartt’s The Secret History (which French names as “both my favorite literary novel and my favorite crime novel” — oddly enough, the reading guide for The Likeness includes not a single mention of The Secret History). Highly recommended.

Here’s a news story that wouldn’t be at all out of place in one of French’s books.

And, to conclude, a surprisingly pleasant and edifying back-and-forth between Matthew Cheney and Tonaya Thompson, an assistant editor at Tin House, about Tin House’s standards for genre material.

Now: back to my to-do list.

I’ve been writing in all caps a lot this week, for several reasons. First: I SOLD MY BOOK! More specifically, my lovely agent Diana Fox sold my novel Alcestis to Soho Press. It’ll be published in their Fall/Winter 2009-2010 catalogue as a hardback, with a trade edition the year after. I’ve already had a quick chat with my very nice editor — my editor! how great is that! — who will be sending me her notes on the book soon. As weird as it might sound, I’m really looking forward to revising the book with her guidance. I spent several months revising it during the last semester of my MA program, but I knew there would be at least a bit more work to do if it ever sold, and I’m happy to get fresh advice.

Diana called to tell me about the offer approximately twenty minutes after I’d passed my dissertation prospectus exam. I’m now ABD, at least unofficially, and I should be applying for candidacy pretty soon if I’m lucky. Life’s going to be a little busy for, uh, the next two or three years. (Every semester I reassure myself by thinking, oh, things will quiet down after X event, and then I am proven entirely wrong. I think I’ll just stop pretending.)

I’ll be back with more book news as I get it!

From the preface to “The Female Wits,” a 1696 play anonymously published in 1704, satirizing Delarivier Manley, Mary Pix, and Catherine Trotter. The (also anonymous) writer of the preface describes Trotter and Pix as:

… two Gentlewomen that have made no small Struggle in the World to get into Print; and who are now in such a State of Wedlock to Pen and Ink, that it will be very difficult for them to get out of it.

I’m thinking about stealing that for my “about” page.

You can also find me on Twitter now, far more frequently than here. Turns out that prospectus-brain can easily manage tiny “what are you doing?” posts. Prospectus-brain can also handle: fussing with new Wordpress installations for the digital humanities project update blog (link soon!); googling gluten-free places to eat in Austin; reading NY Times articles. Prospectus-brain needs to get back to the actual prospectus, however.