Even though the new semester starts today, I have found myself with a little extra time the past few days. I finished my syllabuses last week. There is a lull in my new project. I don’t have much course prep for the week ahead.

Frankly, I exhausted just about every conceivable excuse to put off facing my manuscript revisions. So, over the weekend, I worked up the courage to spend some time closely reading over the readers’ reports, trying to identify common concerns/problems — which, let me tell you, was not easy, considering how divided the two readers were. I also started trying to work my mind around the process of revising the whole book — a huge mental adjustment.

I haven’t really had to think about the ms. since November 2007, when it went out the first press. In other words, I’ve had a nice long mental break from it — and those of you who have worked for years on a project know how invaluable it is to NOT have to think about it, even for a little while. In my case, having almost a year in which I could rest upon the laurels of having a “manuscript under revision” — which seemed at the time like it was merely one small step away from being a “forthcoming book” — was blissful.

However, I am discovering that the ten month break has not made me any fonder of my work, or any better able to think about it dispassionately. Rather, I am thrown back into the emotional stress that this project always awakens in me. Naturally, the circumstances of the mixed readers’ reports doesn’t help matters, as I keep having this niggling feeling that I might be setting myself up for disaster. My darkest fear is that I will make the revisions recommended by the Wonderful and Insightful Reviewer — perhaps spending months on the work, because they are not incidental revisions — only to be told that the press won’t publish it. BIG SHUDDER.

I am trying to simply get to work — but even that is hard. I’m not a Get Things Done devotee like some, but I have read enough about it to value the idea that you break down your To Do list into discrete parts, identify “next actions,” and free your mind of the bigger picture. So I have been attempting to not think, “Revise Manuscript,” which simply throws me into a panic. But, my efforts to break that monumental task down into manageable pieces isn’t going very well either.

Today, I made a list of five Next Actions … just the tip of the iceburg but, hopefully, doing SOMETHING as compared to sitting in frozen apathy will start me moving in the right direction.

I would be grateful for any suggestions: How do you start a BIG PROJECT? How do you break it down? What do you do to make yourself work on something when you’d rather do just about anything else?