“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Tuesday, October 18, 2011

Hyperobjects Liveblog 22

38 000 words. I'm not even sure how they happened. I seemed to do almost no writing at all today, though perhaps that's just a relative effect of having written so much at the weekend. Nevertheless, I'm close to the 40 000.

So far no Zeno's paradoxes are manifesting, which gave me a little anxiety at about 25 000 words. The writing at this stage is remarkably different though. It seems to be split into two: housecleaning and new insights.

My general strategy is to go through the book adding a sentence or two here, some extra thoughts on an existing idea there. All of a sudden, I'll find myself writing a totally new thought. There is a real cut between these two sorts of process that didn't happen until now. Pretty much up until about 30 000 words I was just pouring out what I already knew.

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