Old Good News

I'm doing just about everything I can to avoid working on my critical history for medieval lit., which includes writing a blog post that I meant to write in August and every month since. As an aside completely unrelated to the topic of this post, however, I would just like to note that 

a. critical histories are ridiculous; 
b. I don't even know what I'm supposed to be doing; 
c. regardless of a. and b., writing this is still a better option than writing a 20-30 page legitimate paper on medieval literature about which, after an entire semester of sitting through almost 3 hours of class a week, I still know nothing (beyond a few key concepts). 

Now that that's been handled, back to the good news. 

This summer, about 4/5 of the journal article I published at the end of '09 got reprinted in a book. I had no idea this was happening - no one contacted me in advance, which is surprising despite the fact that the journal publisher owns the rights to my article and can therefore do as it pleases. It just seems like good form to let authors know their work is going to appear elsewhere. 

In fact, that only reason I found out is b/c I have a vain habit (I can admit it's a bit ridiculous) of Googling my name and, lo and behold, the new book came up in my results. 

Look - that might be me
in there! 

I proceeded to contact the book's publisher to request a contributor's copy, and they kindly complied. So I'm in a book. And it's on my shelf.

The two coolest things about this experience are, first, that the general editor of the collection is only like one of the most famous critics in the world of English literature. Love him or hate him, you know who he is. I, for one, happen to love him. (Nevermind the fact that he probably had actually nothing to do with picking my piece.) 

And the second is the fact that the excerpt of my article is the second longest in the book, which contains excerpts from a bunch of articles. Like, it's way longer than most of the excerpts. So I feel cool. 

That's my old good news. At this point I'm nearly out of excuses for not doing my work. Nearly.