OK, the previous post dealt with material written and awaiting publication. Although in one case the piece in question has been in print for a year. This entry deals with stuff that still needs to be written that has been assigned due dates.
In order of nearest due date, I have the following three projects. First up is the paper for the SOAS conference on Cotton in Central Asia. They accepted my abstract and want the first draft of the paper in September. Second up are the remaining four articles for the encyclopedia on modern slavery. They are due in October. Finally, I have an abstract due in November for a conference in Canada.
I am not as enthusiastic about any of these short pieces as I am about the non-academic book I am writing. I have almost 50 pages done. I think it will probably be my most widely read piece to date. Academic publishing just has so few readers. It is now an accomplishment to sell 1000 copies of a scholastic book. An academic journal with that big of circulation is relatively large. But, of course most copies end up on the library shelf unread. The only publication with fewer readers is this blog.
My non-academic book project has been mentioned a couple times on this blog. It is a general history of Russian-Germans under Soviet rule. The working title is Catherine's Grandchildren. I have about 50 pages written so far. I want to provide a general narrative of the subject for non-academics. There is very little in English on the subject and most of it is quite academic. I am hoping that it will find a core market in the thousands of Americans and Canadians of Russian-German ancestry who have an interest in the subject as a hobby. I will be writing more on it once I take care of my fall deadlines.
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