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.