whew

Wahoo, it's done, it's done, my survey of The Year's Work in Tolkien Studies 2003 is done and e-mailed off. My editors sound happy, more probably relieved, to get it. I can't believe how many months this sucker has been hanging over my neck. But it's done, now needing merely to be niggled at. It's only 11K words, but you should see the cubbyholes in my office full of books and papers I had to read, or more often re-read (because I couldn't remember them and found my own notes cryptic) to get this done. And the tedium of some of this! How profs stomach grading endless piles of freshmen papers I can hardly imagine. (Tolkien stomached it by offhandedly jotting the phrase "In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit" on a blank page. See where that got him.)

Now, on to the next projects: another article due in another four months about a whole bunch of stuff I mostly haven't read yet, and the index to an unpublished book I've read at least six different drafts of. A scholar's work is never ... well, something or other, I forget what.