weird cart-before-horse thing

It's no wonder some visiting scholar/postdoc positions are so hard to get for ABD graduate students. I'm writing these letters explaining how I plan on revising my dissertation into a book manuscript when I've still got half my dissertation to complete. Sigh. At least I do feel like I have a good idea of what I'll need to do for revising the diss. It's a little harder to talk about it in a smart way, though. All I can think of to say at the moment is that I want the project to be more immersed in the critical debates of non-literary studies disciplines I'm engaging (like communication studies, legal studies, and anthropology). But how I'd do that is still a mystery to me.