Busy, Busy, Busy

Too long without a message — harrumph. This is our spring break, and I had hoped to do some writing here while I had some time away from teaching. But in this week, I have to:

1. Finish an embarrassingly overdue essay called "Tristram Shandy and the Rise of the Novel" for Eighteenth-Century Novel;
   
2. Finish an even more embarrassingly overdue essay called "The Life of Johnson, the Life of Johnson, the Lives of Johnson" for a collection scheduled to come out on the Johnson tercentenary in 2009;
   
3. Read Germaine Greer's Shakespeare's Wife and review it for the Los Angeles Times;
   
4. Evaluate a book proposal for Broadview Press;
   
5. Write the entire comprehensive exam for the students in our MA program;
   
6. Prepare a conference paper for the following week;
   
7. And, just in case the week was looking too leisurely, I was just asked by Cambridge University Press to edit a collection of essays, for which I have to write a long prospectus.
   

Gack. So much for my fantasy of 168 blissfully uninterrupted hours of gentlemanly leisure. And now I have to start thinking about a conference trip to Portland, Oregon, in a week, and a few days at the Folger Shakespeare Library in DC the week after that.