one day ahead of schedule

Though I said I would not write the Introduction to L’objet quadruple until tomorrow afternoon, I found myself tonight in a mood to begin writing the book immediately. Moods to write must always be indulged, barring genuine social or work obligations, since they are not always present and cannot be squandered in the name of an arbitrarily paced schedule.

The Introduction is already finished. Or rather, the first draft of it is. You’ll remember that I was shooting for 388 words. The current length is 469 words, 81 over the limit. Though it would be easy to cut myself that much slack on the word count, it is almost always a good idea to trim the fat on any finished piece of writing, and 81 words is a nice manageable challenge when hunting for unnecessary words, which I will do tonight before sleeping. Approximately 1 word in every 6 should be deleted.

Points of interest in the writing of this Introduction, which ended up taking around 40 minutes:

*My initial outline proved completely unfeasible. There was no way to deal with all six of those themes in the Introduction, and in fact I ended up writing something that had nothing at all to do with the outline. That’s perfectly fine, of course. I started with the outline, but it quickly evolved into something quite different from what I expected.

*The Introduction transitions very nicely into Chapter One, which I will write next. I wasn’t expecting it to work quite that well.

*The style is surprisingly fresh. I’ve never written in quite this voice before. I’m not sure whether it’s the subtle unconscious influence of the French context for the book, or simply a matter of my being ready to start writing just a bit differently. Whatever the cause, I have a feeling this book will be especially easy and interesting to read.

*There are several lists of objects. Given how short the Introduction is, it’s easy to get away with that. And I think they are pretty well interspersed with more prosaic passages.

The psychological advantage of having started tonight… It can be extremely depressing to wait in line for passport services at the U.S. Embassy, which I will be doing for most of tomorrow morning. All electronic devices must be checked at the door for security reasons, meaning that you are effectively cut off from the rest of the human race as well as all time-passing music for as long as you are inside that heavily fortified compound. And it generally takes at least 90 minutes, and on occasion has taken me up to 3 hours of waiting. They’re not always the warmest and friendliest people either, so the entire experience can have a subtly degrading effect on morale.

For this reason, I always try to enter the Embassy on a high note, with pleasant thoughts to chew on rather than gruelling minor crises. As far as tomorrow is concerned, it’s a lot better to go in there with the book already underway, especially knowing that a tenable intellectual and verbal style has already been established for it from the opening page.