Getting back out there...

I am having a major crisis of confidence over a conference paper I am writing.

It's the first piece of new research writing I have done since I submitted my thesis a LONG time ago. My last conference paper was taken from my thesis, so I knew before I went to the conference that that reading of that play has already been 'approved' in a variety of ways. This is new. This is mine. And I haven't had a supervisor read it, or an examiner tell me it's good enough to pass.

I think my paper will be one of the last on the day, and I'm concerned that, after everyone else's, mine will look very thin. There are so many other things I would like to do to it / add to it, but there just isn't space in a 20 minute paper. I'm also worried that I have fallen into 'lecture writing' mode, since lectures are the only things I have researched and written in the last 2-3 years. I work hard on my lectures, to produce informative and critically engaged / engaging material for the students, but I also think that this is a different discipline from research related writing.

I made a deliberate decision to produce something new for this conference, to boost my research self-esteem (when you've produced nothing other than lectures for a few years, you start to wonder if you'll ever be able to get back into it). But at the moment I feel more academically (and professionally) vulnerable than I have felt in a very long time.

I suppose the only real way to overcome this is to expose my paper to the questions and criticisms of the conference delegates and see what happens.

But I admit, I'm a more than a little bit scared.