Well now I'm just confused

So the conference paper went well and I had time to do some additional revision work on an article that I sent off to a new publication source. Let's hope they're either interested, or at least send back some useful reviewers reports. The confusion I'm experiencing isn't related to the work completed, but to what's to come.

So the conference paper and revision week were last week where I 1) presented the conference paper, 2) revised an article and sent it out before the deadline for the special topic issue, and 3) drafted a conference paper proposal.

As I indicated in the first paragraph, the first two tasks were accomplished in reasonable style and timeliness. The third - the conference paper proposal - was slow in coming together and I was struggling with the wording really badly the one evening while I was there.

So instead of struggling through - which is the strategy I tend to first when I encounter trouble with writing - I left the abstract and went to bed. That was a good thing, it turned out. The next morning I awoke to an email invitation to submit to another conference. An invitation! That's kinda cool. Yes, it was an invitation to a conference that my university is hosting, which means they were just looking for someone nearby. But that conversation with one of the members of the department (who happens to be on the conference committee) the other week paid off. When they needed someone to round out a panel, my name came up, all as a direct result of just chatting with someone about the work I was doing.

So I submitted to the home university conference rather than far-away-and-in-a-different-country conference. Which is all kinds of nice.

What I'm confused about though is what happened when I got home.

I knew that I would spend most of June on an R&R (which came via email later on the day of my conference presentation) and on the conference paper for the July conference. But a weird thing happened between my submission of the abstract and getting the time (now) to write it.

See, I thought the paper proposal I'd sent in was about literary representations of nanotechnology. That's what has been in the back of my mind every time I would think of the conference over the last several months. But yesterday I pulled out the actual abstract I sent. It was about autonomy and identity in literary representations of future technologies. Not quite the same.

I can talk about nanotech in this paper if I wish, but given the scope I laid out when I first proposed the paper, there's little to no need to go into any detail about nanotech.

In some ways, this makes the paper an easier one to write because I don't have to do as much reading (and re-reading) as I thought I'd have to.

But I'm having a terrible time adjusting to the new topic. It's thrown me for a bit of a loop, frankly; hence, the confusion. I'm just not sure where to begin. I know I'll find it, but right now, it's just not coming to me.

What I can't figure out is why I was so terribly sure I was going to have to read Feynman and Sargent and a bunch of other stuff on nanotech, when I didn't originally propose that, and what I did propose is a far better topic for me to try to tackle. Odd.