Here’s my life right now. I have to convert my 14,500 word vagueness paper to a little-over-8000 word paper for the volume it’s intended for. I have to convert my 14,000 word fiction paper to a 1 hour talk to do at UC Davis next Friday. I have to convert my 8500 word (and in need of serious expansion) scepticism paper to a 5000 word paper for the Inland Northwest Philosophy Conference. And I have to deal with some (very good) referee’s comments on my luminosity paper. And I have to do this all before I leave for Davis next Thursday. I enjoy making philosophy papers bigger much more than I enjoy making them smaller.

I’m shooting for most obnoxious blogpost ever here, so let’s switch from self-pity to self-congratulations. I had to write my annual self-evaluation yesterday. As noted yesterday, people tend to be rather excessive in their self-judgments. But I almost ended up erring the other side. I was trying to remember which things I’d done in the past year, and most everything on the CV looked like stuff I’d done in the distant past. It was only when I pulled out a CV from January 03 I realised how much had got done this past year. (7 papers, an encyclopedia entry, handful of book reviews, conference appearances, refereeing, etc.) I think running the blog has moved my time horizon for the distant past up to something much less than 12 months.

Once I had the facts, I rather enjoyed writing the report. It’s a good thing I didn’t go into marketing fulltime, because I’m not that good at it, but parttime marketing is kinda fun. So despite the rather evident fact that most of my papers fall stillborn from the presses, I spent half the afternoon conjuring up all sorts of images of what impact they could have on the profession. I think I described no more than 2 papers as potentially being launching pads for new fields of philosophical inquiry, but some others may also have been described as revolutionary. In the circumstances I’m pretty sure this report will play very little role in my overall evaluation, so swinging for the fences is just a bit of harmless fun.