Draft Done

Commenting on my last post, Sisyphus congratulated me on the writing progress while turning a willful blind eye to the great data loss of 2010. Essentially, I think the good progress of this week has amounted to essentially the same thing:

La lalalalalalala The semester starts in 10 days? lalalalalalala my computer is in a shambles? lalalalalala my office is a wreck? lalalalala annual reports are due this month? lalalalala I CAN'T HEAR YOU!!!!

You know things aren't going well when you are writing academic prose as a way of avoiding everything else.

But if anything, it's paid off in the writing. Ten mostly new pages today (the two drafted pages were primarily outline, and only fragments of sentences remain from that), which adds up to about 22 new pages since Tuesday afternoon. If only I could write at that clip all the time!

I'm labeling the entire chapter "drafted," since the next stage is to get Willow to do her magical editing thing, where she simultaneously polishes up my prose while at the same time points out the places where my argument goes off the tracks.

And there is one place in this essay where the argument does go off the tracks. Whether that is forging brave new territory or simply running into a ditch I cannot say. Many of my readers down the road will say "ditch" but I'm sticking to my guns, for now. Those two pages felt like the most dangerous words I'd ever written, because they risk, I think violent disagreement. We'll see how it goes.