Composition of Philosophy. July 31 (B).

It’s finished. The end-of-July deadline was met, with about an hour and a half to spare. It’s cause for celebration, and I will take care of that starting in a few minutes.

Chapter 5 took a total of 4 hours, 49 minutes, so it looks like four-and-a-half hours for one of these chapters was standard. That’s not so bad, going from nothingness to a publishable short chapter in under 5 hours. I’m not disappointed with the total amount of time needed for each chapter.

Final statistics:

Introduction- 1:06 1,982 signes
Chapter 1- 6:31 24,713 signes
Chapter 2- 3:50 24,587 signes
Chapter 3- 4:36 24,293 signes
Chapter 4- 4:44 24,436 signes
Chapter 5- 4:49 24,327 signes

Total= 25 hours, 36 minutes for 70 double-spaced pages (20,722 words)

The first thing I did was send a copy of the file to my gmail account. What I will do when returning home from celebration is print a hard copy. That’s not only for purposes of additional backup (though it’s important; I’d be a wreck if I somehow lost all these pages and had to start over) but also because I want to do the first read-through in hard copy form. Problems can go unseen when scrolling on a computer page but then stand out glaringly on paper. Also, I like to make marginal notes about weak spots and about unanswered questions that will need to be addressed in the second half of the book, whose outlines are still only in the most germinal form.

I’m going to give myself 7-10 days to brainstorm and outline, and won’t be making regular Composition of Philosophy posts until the actual writing begins. However, I may make intermittent posts under this category if any good ideas about procedures occur to me.

Thanks for reading so far; this has been an interesting exercise, and I have learned a lot already from doing it.