September was Crazy Busy

I was going to say "crazy ass" busy in my title, but I wasn't sure that people who still have me on their blogrolls would appreciate that title showing up on their sidebars. So I censored myself. But it was crazy ass busy, folks. Ass Ass Ass.

September was meeting hell. Our faculty approved some university wide changes at the end of last year, so this year will be working on implementation. Cue extra meetings. Our university is up for accreditation. Cue extra meetings. Our administration made changes over the summer effective immediately. Cue crisis mode. Oh, and meetings. Crisis mode comes with meetings. So all of my time that wasn't teaching has been replaced with meetings and naps to recover from meetings. (There was one meeting this week where I swear I felt myself getting dumber. This meeting has made me decide to decline a few future meetings.)

I have a course release to work on my exciting new book project! Yay! This project is not actually what I thought my first book was going to be. I realized (well, a friend realized for me) that I have enough new material and ideas for new stuff to write a whole new book that is awesome and has not been done before. I knew that I was going to finish mining my dissertation for articles rather than turn it into a book (already published half of it anyway), but I had a different book idea, which is now 2nd book (it will be an easier sell to publishers as a 2nd book anyway, I think, when I'm less of a risk). But the course release has partially been used for naps. Must stop that. I have been working on it. And I have a conference later this month where I will presenting part of a chapter, so that's good (note to self, FINISH IT!). But September was crazy, ya'll. The meetings actually calm down and become more sane starting this month, and there are a few that are not mandatory, so that's good. So I am expecting to be able to not only shift all of the released time back to the book (which I feel so guilty about) but also shift a bit of service time that way too to make up for the shift (and alleviate guilt).

Opinions: How much of a book would one expect to write with a one semester course release (4 courses per semester is a normal load)? My university is vague about this. A colleague said 100 hours of work, but I don't know where ze got that number (I looked where ze said, and it wasn't there). I had originally applied for two semesters of release time, but was only awarded one, so my goals from my application need to be reduced (and again, the application  is very vague about expected results and no one gave me any good advice when I asked people). One chapter plus my book proposal sent out is my current minimum. Is that reasonable? I really have no clue, so any advice at all (even if it is for me to write more) would be welcome.