back to the big one

All right, I’ve finished revising all those articles. It always feels good to tie up loose ends. I was expecting that to take 4 days, but it only took 2. Which serves as further evidence that writing quick drafts is a good strategy– it’s generally much faster than expected to revise them. Slowness in writing is nearly always a result of needing to leap from the void to create prose out of nothing. Even the junkiest draft prose at least has the merit of not being a zero: you can work with it, just as you can work with even an ugly lump of clay. There may be disgust with one’s efforts while reworking bad prose, but at least there is never anxiety over the emptiness of the cosmos and one’s own mind. Get something on paper, and you will be reminded that your mind is not empty.

What will I do next?

No writing tonight on L’objet quadruple, and possibly no actual writing for the next week. What I’ll be doing tonight is collating all of my existing notes on the second half of the book. That will give some impetus toward resuming the book 7-10 days from now.

The other thing I will do at some point, perhaps later this week, is reread the existing 70 pages with fresh eyes. What this will probably show is that a few steps are missing from arguments, and maybe there will be a couple of key points that I forgot to address entirely. The former can simply be fixed, while the latter will probably need to be shuffled into the second half of the book, because there’s just not any room left for adding significant new topics to the existing first half.

Despite these inevitable gaps and omissions, I follow the method of trusting my unconscious mind. If something was omitted “inadvertantly,” my unconscious may be trying to tell me either that (a) I no longer believe it, or (b) it actually belongs in a different place, later in the book. And just changing the place of an idea in the order of exposition often casts a strange new light on it.