I now have a solid first draft of chapter one as well as of the preface and introduction. Currently, that means I have edited 51 of the 219 total pages (which includes the bibliography), or 23% of the total. Tomorrow: on to refining chapter two.

The rough draft of my final chapter is complete!

Currently my dissertation/project has 48,044 words and spans 196 pages.

Instead of writing the conclusion, I plan to start again at the beginning and, in the spirit of Isaiah 40, make "the rough places a plain." I hope to have a solid first draft ready for the first line of editing by the end of May.

After an approximately month-long hiatus in which I've been, among other tasks, writing my part of this summer's youth camp curriculum, I'm moving on to chapter five today. I hope to have a draft done by around tax day, "the Ides of April." Then it will be time to roll back to the beginning and start editing to create version 2.0. After that revision, I'll be ready to start getting comments from readers, whose comments will help me revise further.

I've been a bit off my game the past week or so for various reasons (Magin having bronchitis as well as coming to fully appreciate the unlimited Netflix "Watch Instantly" option along with discovering an unexpected appreciation for "Friday Night Lights"). However, with the weather warming up (at least temporarily), I'm feeling more focused.

The short update is that I'm up to 79 pages. The more important question is whether I'll finish the rest of chapter two this week, so that I can move onto chapter three in February. I'm hopeful. Stay tuned.

I should qualify that my first draft of chapter two is an even rougher first draft than my 'first draft' of chapter one. There is, nonetheless, a marked improvement from a zero draft (a stack of photocopied pages and notes in manila folders) to a first draft. There remains editing to do and connections to be drawn, but the first draft is a major step.

I have completed a first draft of my first chapter -- emphasis on first (of many) drafts. The chapter is exactly 30 pages. So with 6 pages of frontmatter and a 6-page draft of an introduction, that makes 42 pages (of 150-200 total).

I'm tempted to spend another week or so on revising the first chapter, but I am finding two major dynamics at play that lead me to move on to chapter two next week: (1) In each section I'm writing no more than 20% of what I could potentially say and (2) I'm seeing how each decision I make has ripple effects across every other section and chapter as well as over the whole book.

For #1, the whole process so far has been one of winnowing. I'm coming to see this book as a performance. There are so many possible directions, spins, and moves that could be made. The challenge is choreographic: selecting, blocking, and directing the players that will work best together for the larger whole of what is possible in 150-200 pages.

I always thought as an undergraduate and graduate that my dissertation would finally be the time when I could read all there is to read and say all there is to say about a given topic. I now that preconception as naive. Even with one's magnum opus (which this dissertation certainly isn't), there is still 80% or more left unsaid; however, I hope that with this dissertation as well as in the future that I am becoming increasingly wise about what to include in the 20% I put on stage in the final draft.

For #2, I feel like I need to go ahead and write my first drafts of my other chapters, so that I can get a sense of the larger whole. In other words, even if I spend another month on chapter 1, I would have to make changes whenever I did eventually write the rest of the my chapters.

Although I have a good idea of the overall shape of my project, there is still discovering in the writing process itself of exactly what I think and in explicitly trying to say what I think as effectively as possible. There is also a challenge in the discipline of focusing what I have to say into pages that are no more than 30 pages or so each.

So, Monday I'll move on to chapter two. I'll likely spend a good part of the week organizing my notes, and the next three weeks writing -- so that I'll hopefully have a 30-page draft of chapter two completed by the end of January.

Stay tuned.

So, to keep to my original deadline of one chapter per month, I'm going to move on to chapter two next week. However, I suspect the final revision and editing process will likely take longer than I expected -- just as the transition from reading to writing process took longer than I originally guessed.