An ambitious month

I'm not actually sure whether I mean last month (October) or the coming one (November) - they are both ambitious in their own ways. In October, I led and co-wrote a combined literary and poetic text with my collaborators Heather Fester and Marco Morelli for the Mutations volume currently undergoing publication (our chapter is called "quantum flower"), as well as presenting with both these individuals to the 48th Gebser Society Conference in Boulder, Colorado. I also finished the main draft of a paper about our process in developing an interactive opera, that will go into a volume on Interactive Multimedia at the end of November. I did the prep work for this year's NaNoWrMo book project (more on this in a moment), and led the preparation and submission of two major team grant proposals, as well as participating in four other grant proposals. In November, I will be working on the second volume of the White Shadows trilogy, called Incarnations of Evil, as my NaNoWrMo project this year. In addition, I will be travelling to Gdansk in Poland to spend five days doing field work in support of this novel! I have also been translating the first volume of the White Shadows trilogy, Goodness in Small Doses, in French.

This is an amazing project, and allows me to bring in so many currents from world politics today as well as historically, as well as folding in the issues of disability. Just today I was doing some brainstorming work on this, and I am so excited by some of the ideas I have come up with. It is also a daunting task - any project involving extensive background research poses real challenges. I have to not only manage the Polish end of the project, but also a Prague component, possibly a small Viennese element, and possibly a Spain component as well. Fortunately I have spent time in Vienna, Prague, Madrid and Barcelona, so I can draw on those experiences for those parts of the book.