Oh a day off, and it's glorious. Of course, I spent it polishing up my curriculum vitae so it hardly counts as a psychological break from work.And never really a break from thinking about writing.

Resume vs. CV
My resume is pretty well rounded, but my CV is disappointingly thin. I wish I'd gone to more conferences while in grad school, published more of my papers.

I was a single mom through grad school, and as a result life narrowed right down to only what was absolutely necessary: the kids and the requirements of school. Conferences, traveling, would have been extravagances I couldn't afford.

Still, I have managed to assemble a rudimentary CV that I will refine over the next few days. My deadline is the end of the month, but now during Spring Break, I have time to think about it.

Professional Wordsmithing
I'm also struggling with how to translate a year in the marketing field into relevant academic experience. It absolutely was, but how to articulate that?

It's going to translate into the ability to teach how to write in the real world, write for money, to turn your wordsmithing into cash to support yourself. I'd like to find a way to offer that as a course in the English department.

Writing Across the Disciplines
While I was thinking about it, I went through all the course offerings in all the departments and discovered that so many disciplines offer courses in writing. Journalism, Communications, Special Programs, Business, even Engineering. I wonder why these departments don't recruit faculty from the writing department.

A New Genre: Historiography
Along the way, I also discovered a new genre, from the History Department: the historiography.. It's a "focused study on a particular theme, problem or issue from a specific era and field of history" and an assessment of the secondary literature on this topic. Basically, it is how historians assessing how other historians have written about history.

Blogging
Even blogging can be lucrative, though I am not particularly interested in changing the (self-indulgent) nature of the Bitten Apple. I looked today at the analytics of this blog and discovered that 53,000 sets of eyes have read it.That seems like a lot, though hundreds of those page views were probably my own to see how it looked.

While pondering that, I discovered the intriguing detail that readers of The Bitten Apple arrive here while searching for the following topics: Goth, sock monkeys, social exchange theory, Swedish Easter witches and pink Smith & Wessons. I wonder what they think when they arrive?

I can see getting here on the wings of social exchange theory, something I tend to belabor, but it's the strangest thing is that the Goth keyword would get readers here (rather than somewhere else). I've written about Goth exactly once, in "Goth RV Rodeos" (describing a strange dream I had about my neighbors).

And as for pink Smith & Wessons, that was in "Things I Wish I Had." You just never know what you'll write that many people will read.

I get to blog at work now sometimes.

Blogging at work is a Special Project. My boss will wander into my cubicle, ask how I'm doing and then say the words I love to hear: "I have a Special Project for you."

It's always something fun and interesting, something outside the box. One day, I took a client sightseeing. One time, I rummaged through boxes to find something. One day, I proofread a press release. One day, I wrote a brochure. One day, I made a cake.

Blogging is a regular thing, though, and it happens about once a week.

Over time, my understanding of the technology I'm expected to write about has grown. I've only been studying it for a little over a month. I read technical manuals and textbooks over my lunch.

At first it was hard to write, hard to set free the writer in me, when I wasn't even sure of which words to use to string together the technical terminology and jargon.

As teachers of writing know, the surest sign of someone using a term they don't understand is which little words they surround it with; which prepositions they use will show how close their own relationship with the term is.

In linguistics, your (the reader's, the writer's, the speaker's) relationship to the action is hidden cleverly inside those little terms. Think of deixis. Think of dramatism. But I digress (more about digressions later).

Well, that novice writer, that awkward user of unfamiliar terms: that's me at work.

Not only that, but maybe I wanted to liven up the writing, use unexpected active verbs, be creative. At first, I didn't dare. My blog entries were uncharacteristically short, a little stiff.

Now, most recently, I finally wrote about something I actually understood. It was fun, it flowed. But when I digressed in a totally interesting (to me) direction, I was instructed to cut that part out.

So now, it seems, I have leftover parts -- little things I've written that are going to have to wind up somewhere. And of course, by somewhere, I mean here.

Coming up next: The amazing journey of the salmon migrating not only hundreds of miles upstream but also migrating from my work blog to here. Stay tuned!

I finally got down to the business of actually writing my thesis today.

As opposed to seemingly endless research and reading. As opposed to sorting out my previous work, three different papers, under the headings of my thesis sections. And as opposed to crafting a comprehensive works cited section.

In other words I have done everything under the sun to get out of the process of actually writing.

But today, I finally worked: writing, creating, expressing the complexity of my ideas. Trying to lay them out in an orderly fashion without being too dry.

I didn't actually write all day, although I was a virtual prisoner in my apartment, held captive by the necessity to get something done.

All I have to show for it are 511 words that were harder to extract (from what seems like my very soul) than wisdom teeth.

When I look through my other writings on the same subject matter, I seem so fluent that I hardly recognize myself. Why can't I do that this time?

I think of all these American idioms to express difficulty, and they speak to me.

I am out of my depth and in over my head. I have bitten off more than I can chew.

But I can't escape the imperative to write this damn thing. I either write it or I fail. I'm between a rock and a hard place. I have no other choice except to get it done, but I don't feel like I can.

Then again, if it weren't difficult, if it weren't soul-wrenching, then I suppose it wouldn't mean much. And without this baptism of fire, I could never expect the academics to welcome me to their fold.

P.S. Is it any wonder I can't write when all I have to offer are bouquets of cliches?

You know, I always say the reason I'm a journalist (and now an academic) is I don't have the stamina (or the attention span) for long, sustained writing.

I like small things-- news articles, press releases, 5-page literary analyses, etc. -- things you can finish in short order. I work very intensely for awhile, then move on and forget about it.

I am struggling to manage my thesis, which in the grand scheme of things isn't even that long, really: approximately 50 pages when it's done. But I am lost in it and overwhelmed by it.

I have these novelist friends, who think nothing of 40,000 words, who have to limit themselves to a single volume. I look at them in wonder; they're sort of alien beings to me, creatures who have been blessed by both inspiration and tenacity.

I could never do that.

And then I think of the Bitten Apple. OK, so it's an anthology, which by the way comes from the Greek anthologia "flower-gathering-- a collection of smaller works. But there are 217 of them, counting this one.

I am encouraged. Apparently I can do this if I break it into mini-tasks, each section of my thesis like a mini-paper all in itself. Intro, Lit Review, Definitions, Apprenticeship, Transparency, ESL Research, Textbooks, and Conclusion.

I just have to write each one like a small paper, then gather them like flowers, and arrange them elegantly into a thing called a Master's Thesis.