Professors do lead odd lives, relative to many other professionals, as we have this thing called “summer.” I am frequently stopped by non-academic friends, who inquire as to how I am filling up my “free” time. Ha ha ha.
While I’d like to say that I was off doing something glamorous in a tropical locale, that would hardly be truthful. Instead, summer is a time when I hit my writing very hard, and this summer, that means completing the 2nd edition of my biopsych text Discovering Biological Psychology for Houghton Mifflin/Cengage. Mr. F caught me in this candid photo this morning as I pondered one of the ever-thoughtful inquiries from my editor (who is kind enough to never say “what in the world were you thinking here”). I’m trying to decide what labels I need on a diagram of the Yerkes-Dodson Law.
Yes, my desk is cluttered. I try to have a bit of a ritual where I do all my filing once I complete a chapter, but more often than not, stuff just keeps piling up. I’m very happy about how the project is going–the nice thing about biopsych is that one doesn’t need to justify a new edition.
What happens when I’m done with this project? Well, I have two more waiting in the wings in various stages of completion, not to mention the fact that I have a dozen or so ideas for experiments I’d like to run in the Fall that need some prep work….So no tropical locales this summer, at any rate. Fortunately, I live in a pretty part of the world.
