I am writing this out by hand. I will type it up tomorrow, on the computer. A lengthy but not quite forgotten about dispatch.

I have resumed revising Shelf Life: A Book about an Overabundance of Books. I had set it aside, and this was fortuitous. The second half of the last chapter was not resonating at all. It took time and distance for me to realize this. I’m taking apart what I wrote and am reconstructing it. This is what revision is all about. Revision, it means to see again, and this is very apt.

This is what I was thinking. Today, in my head I thought hard about the upcoming changes I needed to make in Shelf Life. What I needed to do made perfect sense to me. I mostly thought about the chapter in which I write about my hip trauma. Right now the title is “Tragically Hip,” but it could change. I had done a good job of describing what happened and the events that followed. However, I needed to elaborate on my realization – that is that I am a workaholic. And as such, I hurt my hip because I didn’t enlist the help of heavy lifters.

Then in the following chapter I needed to say that I elected to do Foraker Group executive director training so that I might connect with like-minded individuals – which are those who would provide me with like-minded insights. What is going to follow is the chapter on Lisa Murkowski. I needed to elaborate upon what her funding provided me with – money for the books in the villages program.

This is what I decided that I needed to do. Things did fall into place in my head. And this was of course quite easy. I sat down at the computer, turned it on, pulled Shelf Life up on the screen, and again (for the millionth time) I realized that it was not that easy. So I forced myself to work because otherwise, the changes that needed to be made would take place in my head and not on the page.

I sometimes think about my interest in the composing process of writers and how in graduate school I was repeatedly told that the composing process as a discipline was passe – that the discipline of composition had moved beyond this and was now instead the discipline of composition and rhetoric. I suspected that there were further connections to be made and that they were not necessarily rhetorical.

I would like to have done some ethnographic studies when I was in graduate school, much like Janet Imig’s The Composing Process of Twelfth Graders. However, my teachers weren’t interested in this.

I pause. I removed my hearing aids so I can’t hear the clock ticking. It’s very cold here and elsewhere. I am sitting very close to the woodstove and the fire is going. I’m going back to bed. There’s no guarantee that I’ll be able to fall back asleep. As of late, sleep has been eluding me. Some things in life are not fair.

Next: 344. 12/23/25: Full Circle