Our book proposal for a volume edited by David Herbert and Marie Gillespie called 'Social Media, Religion and Spirituality' has been accepted to De Gruyters' (Berlin) "Religion and Society" Series (co-edited by K. von Stuckard, W. Sullivan and G. Benavides). I will be contributing a chapter called 'Truck stops and fashion shows: A case study of the discursive construction of Evangelical Christian group identity on YouTube', a second bit of writing I did based on my probation review report (upgrade viva) last year. This is good news and would be even better news if I had actually done the writing, which I haven't. It's due 15 July, like 7 weeks and a baby away. Should be, uh, no problem.
Otherwise, today, a Bank Holiday, has been a rainy, slow day, the kind of day you have at the end of a pregnancy when the focus of life is shifting inevitably to the baby that will soon appear. I, in my weakness, have been avoiding it, locked in my office writing furiously about communities of practice. 2,000 words in a day. Most of it keepers, I think. This is for my supervisors (16 June due) and then for my literature review (mid-July due) and by the end of July, I hope to say that I have my literature review chapter in the can, more-or-less. Or at least in a place where I can put it aside until I get nearer to putting the actual book together. I made a completion schedule--silly, I know--with a goal of submitting 31 August 2012. That means being done with a draft between 1-15 June 2012, and, if you follow all that back to all the writing that needs to be done between now and then, I'm not sure I'm going to be able to get it done. I typed it all out and it's like, two months a chapter for the hard bits. Really? Can I write 16,000 good words in two months? I hope so. My writing is getting better, particularly in the last three months, I think, but I'm not sure it's that good.
In a completely unrelated story, I decided I needed to start running again as my dad and mom are coming at the end of July and my dad is training for a marathon and looking to run with me. I suspect the most I'll have to do is 20-25 klicks with him, at a slower, old man pace (ha!), but still, that's not a run you can do just out of the box. Well, I thought it wasn't a run that I could just do out of the box: last year I really crept up to longer runs. 2011, however, is a different year and I am going on nine-ish months of healthy living (compare and contrast). So even though I hadn't really run since the beginning of January, on Saturday I did 12 klicks, no problem (albeit at a slower pace, like 63 minutes) and today I did 18.7 klicks in about 1:43 ish. I felt it especially going up and down the stairs this afternoon, but I easily had another 5 in me if I needed. So if I do this once or twice a week until they come, I should be okay.
It did, however, make clear to me why I had so much trouble losing weight last Spring. When you run 900-1500 kCals off, your body is ready to eat a lot and you tell yourself that you can eat a lot because you ran a lot, but you get to eating an excess 500 kCals pretty easily. You also only do that twice or three times a week, but your body still has you eating more on off days too. If you don't pay attention (and you're thinking, 'I'm running like a madman, man: I think I can have another cookie'), very quickly you get to a point where you are only making a 500-1000 kCal drop a week or staying even. That's, what 100 grams, a week, best case scenario, and also thinking to yourself that you are really, really putting out. Not good, on any level. Much better to make a 600 kCal daily drop by cutting 300 kCals of food and adding 300 kCals of exercise. Much easier to do (essentially cutting snacking and maybe a dessert while rowing or jogging for 30 minutes a day). Explains most of my health hysteria over the last three years pretty succinctly, I think.