I had my teeth cleaned today by a pleasant hygienist, who I paid £32.50 for the mildly unpleasant experience of having my teeth scraped and polished. I love the feeling after a professional clean, though; I keep running my tongue over my teeth. It’s a similar satisfaction to climbing into a bed that’s been made with fresh linen, or leaving footsteps in virgin snow. Here is something new and untouched and clean.
On Wednesday, I went to my favourite local coffee shop and took out a new notebook. This one was a gift from a friend, and so I felt it should be used for something meaningful. I looked at the blank, clean first page for a while, and then wrote:
Academic year 2014-15
Long term goals
Writing those words down made the page seem blanker than when it had been an empty sheet. What the heck are my long-term goals for the next academic year? I know what my major long-term goal is over the next three years: to produce a monograph on the theme of medieval homosociality. But how to get from empty notebook to manuscript?
I think for many academics, the second book is the real challenge. The first book is often a development of the PhD thesis, and while it can be challenging to complete for a lot of reasons, often the basic argument and structure is already there. It’s a project that may be published in a form quite different from your thesis, but it began with research that was given lots of assistance by supervisors, fellow PhD students etc. For book 2, it can feel much more like you are on your own, and when you’re an early career researcher, juggling your many other commitments can make book 2 a bit of a pipe dream.
I’m extremely lucky in that I am, from the 1st October, an Early Career Fellow funded by the Leverhulme Trust and the University of Oxford. For three years I can work full time on researching and writing this project; although I will be doing some teaching, my schedule is much freer than it has been for the past three years (when I’ve been a lecturer in medieval history). Because of my good fortune in winning this fellowship, I’ve been loathe to admit that I am, actually, a little intimidated by it, because I know how many people would love to be in my position! But one of the things I love about the new online academia – the communities we’ve built up around twitter and blogging – is that it allows for a greater vulnerability.
One of my favourite historians here on WordPress is Matt Houlbrook. Matt is an accomplished, prize-winning historian; he’s also very open about the challenges, crises and insecurities of researching and writing academic history. For instance, I enjoyed his photo essay on the writing of a book chapter. Plenty of academics will admit to struggling with research or writing – in fact, it’s probably not socially acceptable in academic circles to say you find those things easy! – but not many academics actually peel back the layers of their working process so the public can see what tangled inner workings lie beneath the polished final product. More and more these days, as I’ve said before, I appreciate the mess and intimacy of doing history: the mistakes and false starts and getting entangled in the material. But of course, the last time I began a project of this length and scope, it was a PhD, where I had the good fortune to have not one but two extremely able supervisors to help guide me through the maze. If I’m Theseus now, I’m facing a labyrinth where I have no one to give me a ball of string. I need to be my own guide, now. It’s enormously liberating, and also paralysing. Do I go left or right?
I think I’ve decided that I’m not going to know where I’m going until I’ve had the opportunity to get lost. The threshold is the safest part of the maze, but standing there isn’t going to take me on a journey. I flipped over the page of my notebook, and wrote two more comfortable lists: Medium- and Short– term goals. Then, taking a breath, I wrote a couple of things on that first page.
It’s still a pretty empty page; but I am not a blank slate, and I will find the words to fill it.
Rachel E. Moss 
I can empathise. I’ve been working on my second book for several years, and although I’m fairly comfortable with it now (c.25% drafted), it has taken quite a while.
Although I don’t think I did it intentionally, I can see in retrospect that I followed the rather obvious strategy of breaking it down into pieces. First, the post-doc proposal (2010). Then a book proposal with chapter summaries (2010; drafted but still not submitted to a publisher). Then bunch of research alongside a couple of very rough-and-ready conference presentations (2010-12). Then a full-length seminar paper (2013) that eventually becomes an article (2014; which will be part of one the book chapters). Then just dive into a chapter and start writing (2014). So far, so good.
I’d be interested to hear how yours develops.
So, a slightly older post of yours and I am certain you have added much more to that notebook now! I liked whar you said about socialedia allowing vulnerability to show, especially when conflicting circumstances lead you to feel that pthers would be so glad to have what you have that voicing the doubts feels disrespectful. For myself, I’m just going in to the final year of a two year junior postdoc (Lise Meitner Fellowship, Austrian Research Fund (FWF)) and am turning my thoughts to writing this up. So, I’m taling the chance to post some vulnerability on the safety of your blog comments!
I know what you mean about the fresh monograph and research project being a daunting task. In a way I’m on my second although I haven’t actually written the first yet. I felt my PhD thesis was, while being a full thesis, two halves of two different monographs. Or rather half of one monograph and the extended introduction to a printed manuscript facsimile. You know, the type there’s no need to make anymore. So anyway, it became a lovely set of articles and the core of the monograph it wants to become is still waiting in the wings.
However, for me it means going into the open, fresh and somewhat empty plains of the new project (I’ve moved from Anglo-Saxon lawbooks in the early twelfth century to Lombard ones in the later eleventh) but without the experience of producimg a monograph already to draw on. Exciting times! But definitely daunting.
Good luck with your own project and with crystalising the next monograph out of the research-ether!