Composition of Philosophy. July 22.

I’ll do this one early tonight.

One scheduling fallacy of which many authors are regularly guilty, including me, is the assumption that you need a big block of uninterrupted time in which to write. Quite often, the opposite is the case.

Remember, the feeling of infinity is usually a hindrance rather than a help to any writing project. And the feeling of a vast block of free time can also be a hindrance. I was reminded of that earlier this week, when my total lack of obligations made me waste too much time on breaks between section, and eventually even ruined my sleep schedule.

Today, I had obligations that took me to campus early in the morning, which also involved forced sleep last night before I was ready to sleep, meaning that almost nothing got done yesterday. But the effect has been wonderful. Having only a half-day at my disposal rather than a full day has been a tonic in terms of productivity, energy, and enthusiasm.

Also, my phone talk tonight with Paris, while unnecessary and based on the false worry that I had been given incorrect information, also helped re-create a link to reality for this project. If you’re writing alone as if in a monastery, especially in the middle of the night, a certain fundamental insanity begins to creep into any project. The more the project stays linked to constraints of any kind (and interactions with other people are always a mild form of constraint on the seemingly infinite thoughts within) the more real the project becomes, and the happier you will feel about it.

What’s my new plan, after a few days of falling behind? I’ll have the draft done tomorrow. Then it seems reasonable to have it all polished up by July 31. The original plan was to have it all polished up by today or tomorrow, and the next plan was to have the polished first 65 or 70 pages done by the end of the coming weekend. So there has already been slippage from the ideal schedule– but, it doesn’t matter. There will still be a full month to write and polish the second 65 or 70 pages.

Once that’s all done, I’ll need to think about the “possible” second half of the book. Remember, the length of the book can be doubled if the matching grant is received from France, but that will not be known until at least late 2009, it seems.

The way I think I’ll handle that problem is to just go ahead and write the second half, throughout Fall Semester. This book will appear in English as well, after all, and there is no constraint on length with the English publisher. That way, the second half will be ready to go for the French version as well, if funding is obtained.