Yesterday was another reading day -- Roshani had had a sick night, so I packed up some books (some for me, some for her) and went over to her house. The afternoon was spent alternately reading Seth and playing with Zoe -- mostly reading, virtuously enough. I'm at page 1000-something now, and have real hopes of finishing the book today...and maybe even getting some other work done. The full draft of the CYO is due 10/28 -- that's still 11 days away, but I'll feel more comfortable about it if I at least start the second half this week. We'll see.
I do seem to have missed a deadline entirely; ICFA abstracts were due 10/15. I may still try to work up something and send it along -- if they don't use it, I'll try to turn it into an article for Foundation or Extrapolations anyway. But I'm having a bit of trouble coming up with anything worth saying. Ideally, I'd be working on Rushdie's Midnight's Children, because it's a) speculative and b) already on my exam list, so it'd be a good piece to spend more time thinking about this winter. But I read it a few years ago, and I can't remember offhand any arguments I wanted to make about it. I found about a dozen essays on it in a literature search, so I suspect what I really ought to do is a) re-read it, and then b) read the essays. That combination will probably spark some sort of article idea. But it's not going to happen this week. Maybe this weekend; it'd be nice to have a reason to spend Saturday down in Hyde Park, at the U of C library. (Of course, the UIC library is right next door -- I haven't spent any time on that campus. Maybe I should at least check them out.)
If Rushdie fails me, I may try to write something on Goto's The Kappa Child -- it's Asian, so it's tangentially related to my topic, though it's not actually on the exam list. We'll see.
Anyway, back to Seth. Got through the slightly dreary bit in the middle, and the story has picked up again, so the last four hundred pages or so don't seem so formidable. Have a good day, my dears...