The last time I posted was just before Easter, about 10 days ago.
At some point over the Easter break, the full argument of the article has crystallised out. It’s not what I thought it was. It’s bigger, simpler, and makes so much more sense.
At various points over the last 10 days, I’ve sketched out bits of content. And I’m now feeling ready to go.
There’s one thing that I need to do first, though.
All of the original reading that I did was selected because of the direction in which I originally set out to travel. Now that I’ve got a much clearer steer on where the article actually wants to take me, there’s a little more that I need to do to fill in the gaps that I could have ignored before, but are now rather more central.
I need to limit this additional reading so that I’m not just going for more and more… if it turns out that there is more and more to read, then that tells me that I’ve either lost focus again, or that there’s a bigger project here that needs to go and sit in my ‘ideas’ bin until I’m ready to pull it out. But I suspect I’ll spend probably two days checking additional material.
So that means that by Wednesday I should be ready to get a fixed structure down.
That works well, because on Wednesday I’m away from my desk. So I’ll use the change of environment to go analogue, take a notebook and a pen, and sketch out the structure on paper, and then – on Thursday, when I’m back – I can refine it, and work out where to start writing.
Looking back at day 1, my estimate for this week reads as follows:
1 week reading and final structuring: 8th to 12th April. This is good after the week off, as I’ll have a clear head, but I’ll have been thinking about it.
It’s nice to be on track. Rare mind… but nice!
The Garage of Books 