Exponential

Some days I really feel like I'm cheating. I sat down with my book outline this morning, and realized that I have published articles on every one of the texts that will make up chapter three. That means, of course, that I was able to copy large sections from those articles and paste them right into chapter three. Not everything will stay, quite a bit will be altered, and quite a bit more will be added, but still, I added over twenty pages in the course of ten minutes - that has to be cheating, right? At this rate, I have every hope of being done with the nineteenth century by the end of June. Suddenly the whole book seems do-able in a way that it never has before.

Numerically speaking, I've got over 29,000 words total for the whole project, which is pretty astounding. Whether they're good words or not is a completely different matter, of course. In terms of chapter three, I'll have to work really hard to recontextualize the sections that I've pasted in. Basically, in each of the four articles I have discussed the cabins in a particular context, and those don't all relate to the thrust of this chapter at all. The analyses of the cabins themselves are still useful, but I'll be relating them to different questions and to each other in new ways.

Oh, I did add one little piece of original writing to chapter two too, so I'm not totally coasting on my past glory.

WORDS WRITTEN: about 50

WORDS CANNIBALIZED: 7170