Composition of Philosophy. July 24.

Let me quote a few numbers from Chapter 1 of the book, which is now in final form. By “final” I don’t mean that I will never make further changes to it. “Final” simply means that if I had to submit Chapter 1 to press right now, I’d feel pretty good about it.

Chapter 1 is now an even 4,100 words, exactly the target.

It took a total of 6 hours and 31 minutes to write. At first that seemed like too much for what is essentially a mere 14-page article, but then I realized that this is pretty reasonable… The Chapter had no existence whatsoever as anything but an outline, and now, after a total of six-and-a-half hours of work, it’s ready for press in my opinion. That’s less than a full work day, so I guess it was fairly efficient. But it’s not clear that the other chapters will go so quickly.

Now, on the all-important question of the French signes… Even though my French version of MS Word counts only caractères, which means blank spaces are not counted, my old American version of AppleWorks does count the blank spaces, giving me the number of signes that PUF uses to pay the translator.

In the phone call the other night, I was told the book should run to 250,000 signes, as opposed to the 262,000 I’d been told earlier.

Forgetting the very brief introduction for now, with 10 chapters in the book, each one should have the approximate length of 25,000 signes.

AppleWorks tells me that Chapter 1 has 24,713. Good.

I’ll post again on this topic if by some chance I finish off the revisions of Chapter 2.