Resetting

*tap tap* Is this thing on?

Well, yes, obviously it’s on, and hello to you kind people who have presumed that I would eventually resume writing here. It has, I think it is safe to say, been All A Bit Much.

As Neville Morley often remarks, blogging seems to be a medium which has fallen out of favour for reasons which aren’t entirely clear – it allows long-form thought in an informal style, which is often just what you need when you want to play with an argument, share good teaching practice (or ask for ideas about solving a teaching problem), or talk about wider professional issues. It’s also free, which makes it excellent for sharing research with the broader public (as my posts about Seneca do for those working on the Classical Civilization A-level Love & Relationships topic). But (and of course there’s a but) they take time, and over the last couple of pandemic-inflected years, time was what we did not have. So perhaps it isn’t surprising that, after the initial burst of upskilling my on-line teaching skills after my sabbatical ended in spring 2020, the energy to make time and space for blog writing was subsumed into survival mode by spring 2021 and then the slow attempt to recover and get back on top of things in the 2021-22 academic year. I will say that I felt as if I taught the most exhausted and drained students I’ve ever taught in the second half of the spring term this year, regardless of which year they were in, and I knew exactly how they felt.

That said, I do miss blogging and I want to come back to it, not least as a way to think through Stuff, particularly around teaching – I’ve noticed that I’ve been a bit less intentional about improving and tweaking my teaching praxis over the last few years, which obviously, hello, pandemic, but at the same time, writing and reflecting in this space has been an important part of creating the space to do that continuing work. So, here we go, attempting to do another round.

I thought I’d start with Research Things that have happened since I last wrote properly about my research, which (now I look back) was in 2019 when I talked about the publication of Tracking Classical Monsters in Popular Culture. There has been quite a lot of water under that particular bridge in the intervening, um, three years, so here are some potted updates.

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The monsters are coming…

Tracking Classical Monsters in Popular Culture

It’s all starting to get a bit real now on the Tracking Classical Monsters front. I think I last wrote about the structure of the book when I thought it was going to look rather different, so I thought I’d take a moment to give a quick update on how it actually turned out. When I shared the original outline, not only did I think the book was going to have a different title, I also thought it was going to split nicely into two even sections. The first half of the book would do theory and overview, exploring a bit about film and television; the second half would look at four individual monsters as case studies, drawing out the consequences of the arguments made in the first half. Simple.

Alas, the book had other ideas, as I realised when writing the film chapter. It just was not going to be a single chapter, and there was no way I could condense the material down into a single chapter without horribly compromising what I was going to say. Similarly, when I got to the television chapter, I found myself with absolutely buckets to say about Hercules: The Legendary Journeys – in retrospect, I might have realised that there’d be quite a lot to say given that I had watched 111 episodes of the thing, but never mind. This is a great example of the way a project can change between your original conception of it and the final result – in this case, the source material was just so much richer than I anticipated, and I found that in order to say what I wanted to say, I needed to take more room.

Now, it was probably a bit of a blessing that I realised this in the middle of the book rather than at the end, because I was able to make adjustments to the overall plan to reflect this shift in my sense of what I wanted to include. In order to include all the things I’d found and wanted to say about the films and television, I decided that the most sensible thing to do was to cut two of the case study chapters. Sadly, the sirens and the centaurs fell by the wayside, although I did try to work them into other discussion wherever possible – hopefully I’ll be able to come back to them at a later stage when I’ve got a bit more time to look at them in detail. The Minotaur and Medusa stayed because in some ways, they are the most prolific of the ancient monsters who crossed my path while I was doing my research – not that other monsters weren’t there, of course, but these were the two who consistently got sent my way.

So there you have it – the book shifted shape not because the argument changed, but because my source material turned out to be so much more interesting than I thought it was going to be. It was a nice problem to have.

What’s next? Well, there are plans for a book launch in the works when the book is released on Halloween, so watch this space. There’s also now a Facebook group for the book, which you can like here – as well as updates on the progress of the book, I’m also using it as a place to share all the fantastic monsters who get passed on to me as the result of being A Person Who Does This Sort Of Thing. I’m sure there will be other things, but in the meantime I’m going to try and concentrate on not melting…

On writing 2000 words a week

This post, part of my general attempting to unwind from the experience of writing the Monster book at speed, is inspired by a long-ago request from Laura Varnam on Twitter (which she may now have well forgotten!) about a period when I was setting myself of writing the goal of two thousand words a week. She wanted to know why I ended up taking that approach and how it worked – and I admit, it’s not exactly the sort of thing that I’d recommend to most people for most projects.

I came to the ‘two thousand words a week’ approach at the end of summer 2017, when I had a May 2018 deadline for delivering my book manuscript. (You’ll note I didn’t quite make that, but never mind, that was the plan.) I had five chapters in draft and was starting to write chapter six, and was wondering how on earth I was going to make it up to a manuscript of 85k words in time… so I sat down and did some maths and thought about process. I knew I wanted to have a completed draft by Christmas, if at all possible, so I could send it to friendly readers and work on first round revisions myself, and have a chance to work in changes by the May deadline or as close as possible to it. I reckoned I wanted to get to about 80% of my word count to be ‘happy’ with the manuscript length, allowing for edits inevitably making the thing longer and for things like the bibliography, the introduction and conclusion and so on. To get there, I needed to be writing 2000 words a week.

So I did. Which sounds… well, simpler than it was, but I should note that by this point I was writing up thoughts on Xena: Warrior Princess and Doctor Who, before moving on to two case study chapters where the main point was working through receptions and plotting how they all worked together. The writing fell into manageable chunks quite easily, either in terms of episode-by-episode or case study by case study, which meant having it all together in my head was less of a problem than trying to write ten thousand connected words for an article would have been at that speed. It took a while to get up into gear for the writing; roughly half of the weeks, two thousand words didn’t happen, although I usually managed to bank somewhere over a thousand which was still great progress, particularly during term. Equally, when I had planned to be winding down at Christmas with 80% of my word count in the bag, I found myself actually there but with a whole chapter still to write! So I kept up the 2k a week word goal until the middle of February, when there was a full manuscript (bar introduction and conclusion). There was a lot of writing at home; there was a lot of writing on the train during the commute. I got surprisingly good at that, although again I wonder how much the material made it easier than it might have otherwise been.

What did I learn about this? That I could do it, mainly. I also pushed myself far too hard to get it done and finished, and I paid a bit of a price for that, particularly around the turn of the year when pushing out those words made doing other things very hard. I should note that, in order to make those words happen, I blocked out my research day and didn’t let anything else in; I don’t think that was the problem, and indeed it’s a habit I want to make sure I don’t break. The problem was that it put me under enormous pressure to produce and move that word count along to meet my target. I’m not sure the book would be finished now without that level of discipline, and I’m pretty sure that I’d be even more frustrated with the whole process if I were still finishing off a first draft. But the drive to meet the contract deadline, given the general flexibility of academic publishing around this sort of thing, was pretty self-inflicted. Nonetheless, it’s taught me a very valuable lesson – I shan’t be signing a book contract again until I’ve got at least a half-completed manuscript under my belt!

The ending of eras

Today is a pretty huge day. I have just sent off the complete draft manuscript for the Monster Book, now under the working title of Tracking Classical Monsters in Popular Culture.

The last fortnight or so, as I’ve worked towards this point and it’s looked increasingly likely that it would happen when I thought it would, has been surprisingly emotional. As I put everything into a single file yesterday, I found myself feeling nauseous with a fear which didn’t seem to have a particular cause; this morning, walking into the British Library reading room to check some final references, I found myself tearing up. This feels very emotionally different to sending off the manuscript of the Seneca book, perhaps because that was tied up with the completion of the PhD and rode on the waves of emotional exhaustion caused by that, perhaps because it is a hot, hot summer and I am anxious about far more in the world at large than I was when I was working on the Seneca book. (It is not a surprise that I have free-floating anxiety when the most common conversation I am having with friends at the moment is about our respective plans to stockpile medicines.)

But it is the end of an era in other ways too. Today was one of the summer meet-ups for Shut Up and British Library, a loose group of academically inclined people who get together at the BL every two or three weeks to carve out some research time in good company. I came up with the idea at the start of my sabbatical in autumn 2016, a way to make sure I still saw humans despite being on research leave. Rather than stop  at the end of my sabbatical, the group’s now become a bit of an institution; it’s contributed to the completion of a handful of articles and chapters, and a PhD dissertation – and now this book. Shut Up has always been about the Monster Book for me. I’m going to have to find something else to do.

Because another era that ends (or starts to end) here is obligations that I put myself under pre-infans. I signed the contract for this book before he was born. He has never known life without this project (although he’s been very understanding about it). One of the biggest shifts in becoming an academic parent, for me, has been a streamlining of effort – I can no longer work on more than one project at once, and having the contract has meant that finishing the Monster Book has been (from necessity as much as  from choice) the priority. Now this is off the table, I can look at my research agenda with more of a critical eye, not driven by what I’ve agreed to do for other people, thinking about what I can realistically achieve and produce, and indeed what I want to get done. It marks the change in how I order my research work-flow – a change I’ve been working up to mentally for the last few months, but now that it is here, quite an unnerving one to be facing.

Part of the reason for that change is my attempt to move towards a more sustainable work pattern. The risk of moving into mid-career is that you take along habits which are going to mean you burn out. It is not sustainable to work at the intensity of the ECR years without that taking a massive toll on you; you have to find other ways of doing things (including, for instance, establishing personal workload limits to stop yourself getting overloaded without you noticing). While doing the Monster Book has been fun, it has also been really quite intense. I went through a period of at least five months where I was writing around two thousand words per week to try and get the manuscript finished by the contracted deadline. I have written 88,000 words more or less from scratch in (very nearly precisely) two years. It’s been made easier by the fact that the material is fun to work with, and that I haven’t had to become familiar with what the nineteenth century Germans thought on this issue, but that doesn’t make this any less big. It’s been a big job. And now it’s… not there.

One of my reasons for wanting to get the manuscript sent off, besides the fact that the original 1st May delivery date is now well behind us, is that now I have the month of August empty. No conferences, no deadlines, a few research things to think about, some light teaching prep and admin to do. I’ve been pushing myself pretty hard to get to this stage – and while I’m not taking a month off, I’m looking forward very much to taking my foot off the pedal and cruising.

Phew.

On my current writing praxis

I’ve been talking on Twitter recently about my writing practice, and as it seems to be of interest I thought I’d do a blog explaining what I do, why I do it, and a bit about how my practice has changed over time.

The first thing I should say is that by nature, I’m a sprint writer. I have reading phases and writing phases – when my head is down to write, I write, and when I’m gathering material, I read. I put this down to doing my B.A. at Cambridge, where you would have to churn out four sides of single-sided A4 essay in 12pt font each week, and there wasn’t scope to do much in the way of extensive redrafting. During my PhD work, I adapted this into a pretty simple word goal for writing days, which I still use – a 250 word limit (which I can reach even if every word feels like blood from a stone), and a 1,000 word goal, which is the point where I can stop and pat myself on my back if I feel like it, or keep going if I still have things to say.

I observe this limit daily on what I think of my writing days. It’s really important not to confuse generating new words with the process of academic writing, and I don’t; when I’m in this mode, the process of deleting words and rewriting material is classified as an editing day rather than a writing day. Word count is purely for writing days, for the days when I generate the bulk of what I’m going to say.

I’m in the middle of a bit of a change to this at the moment, because of the requirements of the Monster book. I have worked out that in order to get a full-ish draft by Christmas, I need to be writing 2,000 words a week. That’s not impossible – far from it – but it does mean taking a rather different approach to this whole writing thing, and thinking in terms of a few hundred words here and there over a much more sustained period of time rather than a fortnight’s sprint to generate the original rough material. I’m not sure that this suits me particularly, certainly in terms of shorter form work, but it’s what I need to be doing at the moment and so I shall crack on with it. We’ll also see whether this new routine survives the realities of term that are soon going to be bearing down upon it!

Once I have the draft put together, then I get rather old-fashioned. I print out everything, read through it, and mark up edits with a red pen. This might involve crossing out paragraphs, moving them around, inserting arrows with ‘WRITE MORE ABOUT THIS’ in appropriate places… but the draft then becomes my road map for the editing phase as I work through the mark-ups, making the changes as I go. In this phase, rather than judging by words, I judge by pages of edits completed – so three pages, eight pages per day needed to make sure things get tidied up and sorted. Once I’ve done that, I may go through it again, or I may start to work at edits suggested by other people, or I may send the revised version off to someone else for their comments. After that, it’s back to a new copy of the document, a new set of red pen marks, and off we go again around the merrygoround.

I think it’s quite important to note that this really is a process of finding what works for you, and evolving your practice as you go. For instance, I never thought that I’d become a weekly word target writer, or that I’d do research alongside my writing in the way I am doing now, but it’s the only feasible way for me to get this project completed by the deadline. I expect I won’t stick with this way of doing things once that deadline is met, but I’m grateful for the flexibility of mind that made me consider what I might do to make this happen when the thought of doing it my usual way made me despair.

On the Monster book and the perils of television

We are now in the depths of August, which Andrew Adonis has decided in the spirit of university-bashing is our academic three month holiday. Needless to say, I have spent my last few weeks indulging in the hedonistic pleasures of grant application writing, preparing the next version of the postgraduate student handbook, reading draft work from my masters’ students, wrangling all the postgraduate taught admin, and other well-known indulgences of the academic labouring classes. Somehow, alongside all of that, I’ve also found time to get on with the Monster book, last written about at the end of my sabbatical.

At the end of the sabbatical, I had written two and a half chapters of the book – the first two were the theoretical heavy lifting, and the third was going to be the film chapter. I’d also written a conference paper on Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, which I thought would be the starter for the fourth chapter on television. I naively assumed that I would be able to finish off the film chapter pretty quickly and move on. It turned out that this was not to be, because as I cracked on with the film chapter, it slowly became clear that this was not one chapter. It was two chapters. So into two chapters it was divided, which for lack of better reasoning I have dubbed the pre-Gladiator and post-Gladiator phase. Oh well, I thought. Surely dealing with television will be easy.

Alas, once more, this is turning out not to be the case. There are a number of problems with writing about television. The first is that you have to watch the dratted stuff. I can’t just sit down and watch selected random episodes of Hercules, as much as I would like to. My partner finds this position profoundly odd, but if I want to be able to write coherently and sensibly about the whole series, then I have to have seen the lot of it. This is doubly true for monsters – an episode recap might tell me if a monster is at the core of an episode, or perhaps even mention subsidiary rent-a-monsters who don’t get much screen-time beyond their obligatory defeat, but they won’t mention the throw-away lines of dialogue which are in and of themselves very revealing about the place that monsters are given in this rich fantasy world. So I have had to find time to watch 111 episodes of Hercules, which is over eighty hours. That’s a lot of time.

The second problem is that, contrary to my blithe and (in retrospect) daft expectations, not a lot has been done by classical reception scholars on television. Amanda Potter has done some fantastic stuff on the relationship between television and audience, but other than that, the pickings are pretty slim. (I haven’t yet looked at the new Wiley Companion to Ancient Greece and Rome on Screen, which should help a bit.) What scholarship there is tends to look at the television of the historical – HBO’s Rome, for instance, or the much-loved BBC adaptation of I, Claudius. This is all fine and good until you’re trying to put some production context in place for Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and find yourself staring at the wall blankly. Thankfully, Amanda Potter put me onto the trail of Catherine Johnson’s Telefantasy, but it was a close run thing. There’s also a shockingly small amount written about Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, not just by classicists, but in general – there tends to be much more concentration on the companion spin-off Xena: Warrior Princess, mainly because that show created a particularly strong fan-base which caught the attention of nascent fan studies scholars, and has thus cemented it as a community that gets studied. Hercules? Not so much. (Please tell me in the comments if you think there is something I really must read!)

The third problem is that when you start writing about something that’s not been written about before, from a perspective that people don’t tend to think about, you have a lot to say. Which is why I’ve realised that the planned chapter on television is going to be – you guessed it – two chapters. And quite a lot of Hercules. I’ve also realised I’m going to have to be selective about what I watch of Xena, which I’m a bit cross about, but to find the hundred hours required to watch 134 episodes is just not going to happen. Plus I haven’t got the word count, to be honest. (There are also reasons that monsters matter less for Xena than they do for Hercules; I haven’t written that part yet, but trust me, it completely justifies a more selective approach.) Oh, and I want to talk about Doctor Who as well. Definitely two chapters.

In a way, this is good news, in that it’s all words towards the final manuscript total – I’m aiming to write 80% of them in the first draft, which has rubbish reference formatting and will need some tidying up on that front, and then for the remaining 20% to be introduction, prefatory material, bibliography and explanatory edits. On the other hand, it means my cheerful assumption that I knew the shape of the book when I started writing it has been neatly upended, and that the final product won’t look as I expected. Oh, and that I need to be writing about two thousand words a week to have this draft finished by Christmas, to give time for people to give me feedback and for everything to be tidied up before the contracted deadline.

I guess that’s my card marked, then…

On sabbatical goals and #acwrimo

I decided this year that I was going to have a go at Academic Writing Month, better known as #acwrimo over on Twitter. Taking its inspiration from National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo, it’s basically a way to get an academic writing practice established – whether that’s daily writing, having a project finished by the end of the month, you name it, you can have a go at it. I had a go at this back in 2012, with mixed results – I found it a good way to push myself forward on revisions for the Seneca book, although I didn’t get as much done I as I wanted (plus ça change). AcWriMo isn’t good for everything – its emphasis on counting words, for instance, isn’t always the most helpful thing to do to help move your academic work along. But right now, given the fact I’m trying to get as much of the monster book drafted as possible, I thought that going the AcWriMo route would be sensible to move the sheer generative phase forward.

And so I set myself a very simple goal – to write at least 500 words a day, with Sundays off. And it worked really quite well… until the 22nd of November, when I completely fell off the bandwagon through a combination of full family sickness, travelling to a research seminar and giving a paper, and needing to finish the work of rigorously checking the proofs of the Seneca book by the deadline. So there’s been quite a lot of academic work in the last week or so of AcWriMo, but it’s not really been translating into words. Which is fine, not least because the proofs have been returned, the seminar was successfully given, and generally all the other bits and pieces I needed to do are more or less done – thus again reinforcing the point that word count isn’t always the most important thing.

But on the issue of word count, I don’t think I did too badly – overall, I managed a bit over 14,000 words in those three weeks. This was made quite a bit easier by the fact I’m counting my seminar script and handout translations in those words, and the former certainly pre-existed and just needed to be shaped into a script form. But the other words mean I’ve now got all of chapter two for the monsters book in first draft, and chapter three is under way.

When I applied for this sabbatical, I said that my goals for the term were to complete the majority of the Monster book manuscript, and to complete an article based on the research seminar. A short, sharp encounter with reality meant that I soon revised the first goal to having the first half of the Monster book in first draft, which feels like it should still be doable – not least as I’m due to give a paper at an AHRC conference in a few weeks based on chapter four, which should get that started. I’m not sure about whether the article manuscript will get much further, but at least I know what I want to say and that there is a kernel of an idea there. So it’s all progress – and sometimes, putting the words down onto the paper is what you need to do.

Sabbatical planning 1 – Shut Up and @britishlibrary

I’ve been thinking about planning my sabbatical term, and have realised there is a big risk of not seeing a sufficiently high concentration of humans over the next few months, which I know is bad for me. (I suspect it will be even worse than it has been in the past given that a lot of the time when I do see humans, I’m seeing them in the capacity of infans’ mother rather than as an academic.) So I thought I’d see if anybody would be interested in a semi-regular meet-up at the British Library – a version of Shut Up And Write, but a bit more flexible.

It turns out that Clare Vernon is in the market for something like this, so we’re going to meet up on Wednesday 14th September for the first of these sessions. The plan is to meet at 9.30am for a pre-desk cup of tea in the downstairs café; meet up again for lunch; and then perhaps meet up for an afternoon tea and a debrief. We’ll also put dates into the diary for the rest of the term – I’m hoping we’ll go fortnightly, although prior commitments may mean we’re not always on a Wednesday and we might not always be fortnightly.

So if you’re on sabbatical or working on research solo and would like an informal way of keeping in touch with other humans, feel free to come along. One of the reasons for setting dates is so that people who can’t make every session can plan to come along for a day – and if you can just make it for a morning or an afternoon, then you’re welcome too. The point is to create a bit of structure for community and hopefully facilitate some research work – I suspect Clare and I will set it up to suit us, but if you can hack it to suit you, then that’s all to the good. If you’d like to know the dates we come up with, please get in touch and I’ll keep you updated.

Changing times, changing working practices

Of all the possible blog posts I could write at the moment, I’m starting with the low-hanging fruit of some reflections on what I’ve learned over the past few months about the reality of being on sabbatical and being a parent. This is partly because Academic Twitter has been talking about working practices a bit more than usual, focusing around Raul Pacheco-Vega’s posts about low-hanging fruit and how to pick it, and another burst of interest in my post about academic otters. But as I mentioned in my last research-focused post, I am moving into a new book-sized project at the same time as having a sabbatical, and I need new strategies for how to organise my time and workflow now I’ve moved to an ideas-generating phase rather than a refining phase. (Jo Van Every has a post that articulates this better in thinking about summer writing plans in general.)

My initial plan was brilliant, simply brilliant, I tell you. I mapped out precisely which chapter and side project I was going to work on for every single week until the end of the calendar year, so that I’d have a full draft of the book by the end of my leave, and would have done All The Things. Marvellous.

Except that by the end of the first fortnight of the new Grand Plan, it wasn’t marvellous at all and I was already very, very behind what I’d hoped to get done. There were a couple of reasons for this, the most obvious of which was that I had assumed I would be able to work on the Monster book and Mazes Intricate, a related but separate chapter manuscript, at the same time. The chapter is due in November, so squeaked priority – and while some of the reading I’d done for it also fed into my thinking about the Monster book, when I got into the writing I wanted to get Mazes Intricate finished rather than spinning off onto other things. So, big lesson one of Being A Researcher With A Small Child – don’t try and do multiple projects at once. Focus on finishing one thing at a time. This is very different to when I was doing my PhD, when I’d have (at least) one other article on the go alongside my current chapter, as something to go to as an intellectual break and refresher. Now my intellectual break is helping infans explore how pouring lentils from one container into another via the medium of a yoghurt pot works. Same intellectual function, different learning outcome, to repurpose some jargon.

New worlds, new projects, new monsters

I’ve been meaning to write this post for a while but finding the opportunity and the words has been difficult. I’m coming through a bit of a perfect storm of conclusions – the end of being on a temporary contract, the end of working on the Seneca book manuscript, the end of teaching, the end (nearly) of exam term, the end of when I was supposed to be working at Royal Holloway. The thing about endings is that they bring beginnings with them – but these aren’t the sort of beginnings I’ve been used to. I’ve been thinking about this quite hard, because at first I assumed that my inability to think beyond the next short-term task was down to the small person – as I’ve said before, during maternity leave and the first few months back at work, I wasn’t up to anything more strenous than editing work. But there’s more to it than that.

In intellectual terms, the submission of the Seneca book (even if we still have to get through the foothills of indexing and copyediting) is a remarkably huge deal. At this point I have been working on it for eight years, in one form or another, from the original idea I suggested for my PhD and which got laughed out of court, to the germ of an idea about Seneca which I still vividly remember coming up with when walking down a summer road in Brooklyn, through the process of writing and defending the PhD, then the elongated and lengthy reiterations of editing, editing and editing some more to make the thing into a book… it’s been a long intellectual journey which has revolved around that material. To wave it off has been more of a jolt than I was expecting.

Moving onto a permanent contract marks a new phase too. I’ve spent every single year of my life up to this point thinking in terms of stages. Work to the GCSEs, to the A-levels, to the BA, to the PhD, to this short term contract, that one, and that one… there’s always been a fixed end-point around which I have structured my time and goals, particularly over the last five years. Suddenly, that’s gone. I am finding it quite difficult to adjust. (I know this is ‘my golden slippers pinch terribly’ territory, but bear with me.)

One of the immediate effects of my contract change is that I am eligible for a research sabbatical term next academic year – for those of you unfamiliar with this, the idea is that you take some time off teaching and administrative duties and focus solely on your research. In practice, all sorts of things tend to encroach on that time – but, thankfully, because nobody was planning for me to be at Royal Holloway next year, there is very little that has the potential to encroach, this year at least. So I can take the excellent advice that has been given to me by various people and think about consolidation.

What that means in practice is that I’ll be spending the summer and autumn working properly on to the next book project, which feels unbelievably daunting because the manuscript is due next year. I have to keep reminding myself that there are lots of different reasons that this book is different to the first, in terms of content and audience, and indeed the fact that I have got a lot better at writing than I was back at the start of the PhD. I’ve also been thinking about the ideas I want to explore in the new book for a while – ever since I wrote the Harryhausen piece – so I’m not starting entirely from scratch.

Yes, folks, this is finally the debut of the Monster Book. I had been planning to do this after the second Seneca book, but at the last Classical Association meeting I attended the opportunity came up to explore doing it at this stage, and I figured it would be a nice change of pace to do something reception-y that has been bouncing around in my head for a while. The book all stems from my vague dissatisfaction that there doesn’t seem to be a satisfactory way of explaining the appearance of classical monsters in popular culture. The book is meant to look at the ways that the ancient monster is reimagined in popular culture, and locates it in contemporary space. I may have to come up with a System, which is a bit unnerving, but I’m sure I’ll think of something. I’ve already made a start with the conference paper I’ve just given in Poland at the excellent Chasing Mythical Beasts conference – the paper for that is going to turn into a free-standing article but it’s all grist to the mill. I’m also giving a paper at the Celtic Classics Conference which I’m hoping will be one of the earlier chapters doing some of the theoretical heavy lifting.

There are so many issues to think through here. There’s the whole glorious world of monster theory to get stuck into, not to mention the fact that monsters have got all trendy in scholarship about ancient texts and I should probably get the hang of that. There’s a wealth of popular culture to get to grips with (which means a lot of bad things to read and watch, and hopefully some gems to discover in the middle of it all). But most of all, I have to get into the mindset of doing new, fresh research again, and start generating new words and ideas. At the moment, that feels like the hardest thing of all.