It's amazing how in an idyllic, quiet setting where nothing much tends to be happening at any given time, there somehow seems less time than ever to do things: make phone call, write letters, etc. I will say that I've gotten a great amount of work done. I suppose the only question is whether or not it's the right work.
My first chapter has 11 sections to it and I've written 7 of them. Today my goal is the 8th.
I got frustrated last night and decided to skip ahead and start working on chapter 3, which I discovered, to my delight, worked a wonder to expand my view of what I'm doing. I have a much better idea of what I need to accomplish in Chapter 1 if it's to get me, eventually to Chapter 3.
The feedback I've gotten mostly revolves around the fact that everything I write is too dense: too many images, too much philosophy; when it's clear that every word is carefully chosen, it makes the whole thing feel overwrought. This PhD anthropologist gave me some very honest but hard criticism saying it felt like I didn't love the reader and I was making him or her work too hard for too little of a payoff. That nearly made me want to quit the whole thing and I sat for hours on my floor with the lights off asking myself over and over about what it is that I think that I'm doing. The solution proved to be to just work on Chapter 3 instead and I think that got me on a better track.
Later that night, I went to a dance party and a few people sat me down and made the point to me that they had really enjoyed my reading on Sunday and they gave me a little hope that perhaps the anthropologist's critique was less universal than I feared. Maybe the whole thing just needs to be heard read aloud.
I don't know. My new goal is to aim to finish a solid polished draft of Chapters 1 2 and 3 - the first 3rd of the book, but also something that hypothetically could be published as a separate thing: Volume 1 of 3. As volume 1, it will probably prove to be about 60-65 pages single spaced.
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