Yesterday morning, at the start of my business day, I saw on my desk a sheet of paper titled “2017 Priorities, as of 10 Jan 2017”. When I wrote that I mean writing priorities. That’s what was on the sheet, the things I planned to write and publish in 2017. It’s now close to two months later. I knew that wasn’t still accurate, as the things to be done early in the year are behind schedule, and thus the things I intended to do later in the year may not get done. So, I decided to re-write it.

Now, these are written on the back of the small sheets I tear off my Dilbert desk calendar each day. I’m not talking about something real formal here. On the 10 January sheet, I had seven numbered items originally, written in approximately the order I wanted to complete them, but without dates or deadlines. The I realized I forgot the thing that was to be number 1, so I squeezed it in between 1 and 2 and numbered it 0. The I realized two other items I’d left off, one for early in the year, one for later. So I wrote them at the end and used appropriate arrows to show where they would come in.

I re-wrote it and put everything in order. #1 is my first priority, #2 is my second priority, all the way down to #10. I don’t really expect to get to all 10 items in 2017, but I’ll work my way down the list and see how far I can get.

Then, I realized I’m working on something right now that wasn’t on the other list. It’s a discussion of a scholarly paper someone wrote and is soon to present at a conference, a religious paper at a religious conference. So I wrote that at the end, without a number. I don’t really know what I’m going to do with that; perhaps nothing. But it’s taking my writing time, so I should have included it.

Then, while I was looking at that paper at academia.edu, I decided to do a search on Thomas Carlyle. I immediately found a scholarly paper that is germane to my item #8, Thomas Carlyle’s “Chartism” Through The Ages. I took time to download and read the paper, and write an e-mail to the author. #8 is kind of far down the road to be doing anything on it right now, but since I was at that site, and since it came up, I did the brief bit of research.

Now, I’ve learned over the year that, whenever I ratchet up my writing time, or even just plan to ratchet up my writing time, something in life blows up and the plan can be trashed. Without going into details, that what happened by noon today.

So, what is my writing plan? Right now I have no idea. Maybe things will clarify in a week or two.

Since August 2016, in the mornings, after I get to work, get my coffee, fix my breakfast half-sandwich, and have my devotional time, I’ve been working on my bibliography of Thomas Carlyle’s compositions. I had done a lot of work on it before, and had almost all of his known works entered. But I wasn’t sure of their composition order; nor did I know whether there were other works that prior bibliographers missed.

I started work on this at least five years ago, but laid it aside when other items pressed. Then I worked on it from late 2014 to about September 2015, but laid it aside again. From August 2016 until this week, my morning routine has included a half hour with Thomas Carlyle. During these months I made significant progress. I had, back in 2014-15, done the main entries, then researched in his letters to put in order those compositions up to around 1830. Since August till last week I was up to 1841. I had moved from his years of writing mainly magazine articles to mainly books. So the compositions were fewer, and the research easier.

I know I’ve written about this before, but bear with me while I go through it again.

This work is tentatively titled Thomas Carlyle: A Chronological Bibliography of His Compositions—or something close to that. I want to get his works into the order they were written. His first bibliography, published the year of his death (1881), had his articles grouped by magazine, and his books chronological by publication date. But it missed a lot of his unattributed pieces. The next one, published in  1928 by Isaac Dyer, picked up most of those unattributed works, but arranged them alphabetically. He also had a chronology, but it didn’t include every composition.

From 1963 through 1965, G.B. Tennyson published a book and some related magazine articles on Carlyle. In these he included chronological bibliographies, of his prose and his poems, for the period up to the publishing of Sartor Resartus in 1834 (but going to 1840 with the poems). Then, in 1989, Rodger D. Tarr published what is seen as the definitive bibliography of Carlyle. It is arranged chronologically by date of publication, though contains many notes to help establish a chronology.

So, I’ve found these four bibliographies of Carlyle’s works. What need is there of another? Perhaps none. But none of them were what I wanted for my Carlyle research. I wanted to know the order he wrote things in to try to determine the changes in his writings and tie those to the events he was part of. I think I found one such key event, and I’m working on a book about it. But, to be certain, I needed to know the order in which he wrote everything. Not finding what I wanted, I decided to produce it myself.

I think I’m around 70% done with the bibliography. So why stop now, you ask? I’m just too busy. When I look at my writing/publishing to do list for 2017, and try to establish some priorities based on publishing, the bibliography is low on the list, and will likely be for two or three years. Other things are more important. In a future blog post I’ll again go through my 2017 plans, and update my readers on where I stand with them.

In fact, I’m not sure I’ll ever publish the bibliography. I don’t know that it has much commercial potential. Carlyle scholars are few. Those interested in his works may be a few more, but still not many. No, I’ll work on other stuff for a while. Maybe in six months or a year the urge to finish this will resurface, and I’ll get at it again. But for now, Carlyle and his works will have to lay dormant to me.

As I work my way through the Time Crunch, which has turned out to be every bit as extensive as I expected, if not more so, I have slowly been taking time to evaluate various writing projects I’ve started and decide whether to just abandon them as opposed to put them on hold. For example, my book Documenting America: Civil War Edition, is on hold. I hope some day to get back to it. It may be more than a year from now, but some day.

One of my projects dealing with Thomas Carlyle is a bibliography of his writings. I believe I’ve written about that before on this blog. It’s not a true bibliography of the things he published, but rather a chronological listing of his writings. I’ve seen four full or partial bibliographies of his published works, from 1881, 1921, 1965, and 1988. None of them have a complete listing of what he wrote from earliest to latest.

Ah ha! I thought. That’s a hole in the published works about Carlyle that perhaps I could fill. So I began working on this in off hours, I’d guess close to a year ago. I played around with what form it would take, how comprehensive it would be, etc. I worked with the first 50 items, got them in the correct order (as I saw it; another researcher might differ with me on a few), and typed it all up. Here’s an example of what it looks like, one item snipped from it.

This looks at those other four bibliographies and compares them to each other and to mine.

During this Time Crunch I was still working on this project. Since looking at Carlyle’s letters was essential to this work, I was going through his letters one by one at the Carlyle Letters Online, finding references to different projects, and adding them to the manuscript of my chronological composition bibliography. A letter or two an evening and having my manuscript notebook handing to pencil in a few things seemed a good way to fill odd moments between major evening activities and bed time.

But, early this week, it all became too much for me. I decided the heck with it. The notebook, the two bound bibliographies, and whatever loose sheets are lying around for this project are all going on a shelf or in a drawer somewhere, perhaps never to be seen again this side of my eternity. The project is too big for completing in 20 minute time chunks.

When I say the project is abandoned, does that mean I will never come back to it? That’s my intention, but never say never, as they say. Who knows what attitudes and time retirement will bring when at last it gets here? Maybe I’ll write again, and maybe I’ll pick up this project again. But here I state my claim that I have no intention of ever picking it up again.

There, that’s said and done. One less thing to worry about not getting done. Tonight, when those items go to their resting place out of sight and out of mind, I believe I’ll have a moment’s peace.