punching the clock

It occurs to me that it may be interesting to keep track of how long it takes to write this book. (I’m speaking only of actual writing and revising time. If you count the amount of time spent outlining, the number obviously rises, let alone if you count all the background study and thinking needed to generate the ideas in this book. But it would be too grim to time all of that, whereas with writing time there is a good practical reason for measuring it.)

So far, then…

Introduction. 55 minutes, 381 words.

Chapter 1, overview. 43 minutes, 300 words.

At first glance that feels a bit slow… 6.949 words per minute. At that rate, the entire book would take 103 hours of actual writing time to complete, which is longer than it sounds. (Last summer I reread all of Husserl’s massive Logical Investigations, while taking detailed notes, in 34 hours and 9 minutes.)

However…

1. These are highly polished pages, not the rough pages I usually have at this stage.

2. The opening words of any project often go more slowly, since one is always careful about setting the table the right way.