So, I finally submitted my book manuscript this week. Because of that, and the amount of time spent reading, rereading and rewriting myself that this activity entailed, this is not going to be a particularly long post.

Let it take the form of a list, in hommage to Eric Griffiths’s If Not Critical, which – in one of the final rounds of book edits – I ended up incorporating into my book’s introduction.

• A title: The Art of Transition: Performance and the Passions in the Eighteenth Century
• 99 538 words long (I’m expecting to cut once I get the readers’ reports);
• 5 chapters, an introduction and a coda;
• 9 illustrations, two colour and seven black and white;
• Around 1 000 footnotes, many of which are still a little rough (Word does not like so many field codes – I’ve started earning LaTeX)
• 17 months overdue (this terrifies me);
• 11 redrafts of my most redrafted chapter, although most chapters went through more than 5 redrafts;
• Five things I didn’t expect to be in the book when I started but couldn’t be left out by the time I’d finished: David Hume, William James, so much musicology, early works of pathology, and one apocryphal story about a dog wearing a wig.
• Two things I definitely expected to be in the book, and ended up being even more present than I thought they would be: David Garrick and William Shakespeare. I am a sucker for authoritative white men.

I’m sure I’ll write more about this manuscript in the future, but for now I’m all written out. All I have left in me is (I think) a reformulation of one of the chapters into a paper on ‘character’ for ASECS in Denver, and then I can move on to the new project (project TBD).