Comp. of Phil. postscript

I’ll probably just do one more section of Chapter 3 tonight, and then call it a day. The reason is that the remaining three sections of Chapter 3 are all too short, which means I want to put a bit of early-morning fresh thought into what is missing from them right now.

That means that, by day’s end today, I’ll have around 35 pages of the book more or less ready for press. That’s about a week behind where I wanted to be, but things are still moving fairly quickly, and there is now nearly zero risk that the book won’t be finished on schedule. And that’s important for a number of reasons. As late as July 15, not a single word of this book had been written. Ten days later, it’s well on course for completion.

There’s a certain stylistic spice missing from the completed pages so far, but the spice is the easiest thing to add.

It occurs to me that writing with all the constraints that exist on this project is almost like writing with a co-author. That’s not a bad principle, in fact… Every book should have a co-author, even if not a human one. Why? Because left to our own devices, we all tend to repeat ourselves too much. We all know only a certain number of jokes, hang out in a certain number of restaurants, and have read only a certain number of books. It’s from translating our own concerns into those of others, or vice versa, that we jump out of the ruts that fate always prepares for us if we aren’t careful.