I Just Thought I Was Finished
The Writing Jag Part II

[Image: This is my office during the project. No, but, in truth it is photographer Walead Beshty composition, Dismal Science Reading Room, from June 7, 2006, Wit of the Staircase]


So at some point--it was after 4 am.--and the Late Night Mixtape is playing on WRIR, when I realize I'm hearing "Riot On The Radio" and "International War Criminal" each for the second time that I realize, well, I've done it again. And this minor filling task of the Rag-time in Richmond manuscript has turned into a forced march, a slog, and this is still before the whittling down to fit the proscribed size limits and all else that must be done to ready this thing for publication.

Amie got me up, though I complained, to get back at it and now with oatmeal eaten and coffee working here I am. It's October 23, 1909 and things are getting a little hazy. Wish me luck. This puppy has got to get done today, bibliography and all. I sense another very late night.

I'm goin' in.

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Yup, still at it. Break for the pool, much needed, but my right eye is hurting and all the joints of my fingers, and I'm daubing with a cotton swab my upper right canine tooth with an alcohol pain deadener.

It's like midnight and I have two day's worth of work still and one night to do it in. And it's Monday, it's not like I can ask off from work. I'm kind of going nuts, slowly, back here in my time capsule.

Riot On The Radio, indeed.

Amie opened an envelope of my checks this afternoon without thinking and wondering if it was my copy of "New Adventures In Pornography." Which I think is a great blog name, and that's appropriate, since she came up--through my not hearing her correctly--the name for this one.

I have to go splash water on my face and weep a little.

The Never-Ending Term Paper
I'm writing a book by Monday, if I don't collapse first


[Image: This is my office during the project. No, but, in truth it is photographer Walead Beshty composition, Dismal Science Reading Room, from June 7, 2006, Wit of the Staircase]



Billion-eyed audience, come on in my friends, to the term paper that never ends, come inside, come inside...

I'm not posting because I don't love yall, or that my neurotic need to inflict my...whatever...experience on anybody who happens to pass by here. But I'm trying to finish a book: Ragtime In Richmond: Socialists, Suffragists, Sex and Murder (1910-1911) for the History Press. It's past due. For the past several months, I've been looking at pages that look quite a bit like this:


This is an excerpt from the December 26, 1910 issue of the Richmond Times-Dispatch, with an account of the fire that destroyed the north wing of the imposing Italianate pile called Ryland Hall, between Ryland and Lombardy streets. Most of the students were away, but 24 were still on campus, and 13 in the dorm rooms in that wing. Four fraternities had rooms on the fourth floor of the building, and something seems to have happened that ignited a fire around 4 a.m. Engine Company #10, just a block away, responded. (This is now the Firehouse Theater). But they had difficult setting up their ladder truck. There was general alarm. And a mummy. But you'll have to read about that in the book, or one account, here.

While I'm at it, I need to give a shout out to the Library of Congress Chronicling America project. This grand effort unites digital preservation efforts nation wide of newspapers during the the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The Times-Dispatch of 1909-1910 is there, though not the News Leader or Evening-Journal. But let me tell you, it has so aided my undertaking that I can't even tell you because my brain has turned into guacamole. This is an expenditure of tax dollars I salute, and its absolutely free. God bless the Archivists....


[Image: June 19, 2006, "Bingeing On Books In L.A," Wit of the Staircase.]

There she is, my Deadline. She waits for me; restive and annoyed and eager to get on wit it, wondering why the hell I haven't gotten this done a month ago. And I want to make her happy, yet I fear her.

Now, I must run. President William Howard Taft is reviewing VMI cadets in front of the Lee Monument. Really.