It’s 2 p.m. I’m driving home from the office without my computer. I got to campus at 8:30, went to a coffee shop, and wrote intensely until about 11:00. Then I went to my office, did some more, had lunch, worked a little bit with a student on a grant, then did some more writing on the book. I’m done for the day, and it’s only 2:30, which is good because I’m zonked. I’ll go home for a hike. It feels like cheating, stopping early. But, it’s already been a six-hour day of editing, cutting, quoting, polishing, revising, and rewriting. More manual than intellectual, really. The book’s argument is that writing can be a form of more manual labor, after all. The section, I picked at for years. Maybe five years? It’s an about fieldwork and feelings of anxiety, of being a spy, an outsider, out of place, doing something where they don’t belong. It’s a common feeling, I suspect, for anthropologists. It’s also about cane toads, gossips, tattletales, snitches, and spies. Its now 800 words or so. That doesn’t seem like a lot, but because it’s tight, it’s dense.
At the end of the day, before checking out, I did some rough notes for tomorrow using voice dictation. It’s about thinking about ethnography as both an extractive and an artisanal endeavor. Tomorrow I’ll tighten up the rest of what I’ve already written and then do a first pass on the notes. Friday I’ll finish the whole chapter. It will be about 7,000 words.
I have no idea how that will count for NaNoWriMo records. I’ve been doing a lot in the last few weeks, but haven’t updated or tracked word counts. The election derailed me a lot. Then, I did a bit of programming. Today and Friday, were pretty good writing days.