Headway

I have read, written and revised for two days in a row now, largely working on the chapter whose argument itself needed the most overhauling (Chapter 3, or Section1 chapter 2, depending on how you're counting). I at once feel pretty good about the work I'm doing, even as I cringe at some of the prose I wrote on the subject when I first drafted it. This chapter itself was written in the final throes of dissertation revision (7 years ago, now), and are at once naively composed and wildly out of date. Some of the central argument and most of the close readings remain valid, but damn, so of the phrases written there sound, frankly, like a 1975 consciousness-raising tract. Revision is indeed good.

Speaking of, I've drawn up a revision tracker over there on the right, which shows how much is revised and current, how much is drafted but needs revision, and how much I expect to draft from scratch. According to that, as of yesterday, I had about 105 pages of updated prose, another 75 that will need some kind of revision and polishing, and about 70 left to write from scratch for a goal of roughly 250 pages or 8000-9000 words. So watch me as I write, and I'll try to update that occasionally and at periodic intervals, post tallies at the bottom. Fingers crossed!