“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


Saturday, October 8, 2011

Realist Magic Liveblog 15

The book is now stable. I'm working through it for continuity issues, and I'll be done in two days. Here's the thing. To write a book well, at least for me, I have to do the whole thing as a kind of blob. I've talked a bit before about how I wrote The Ecological Thought as a 3-page summary and then just kept on adding sentence after sentence. Well Realist Magic didn't quite turn out that way, but I did write the whole thing sorta kinda how it should be. Then as the weeks went by I've added greater and greater levels of structure to the thing.

Adding one painstakingly crafted sentence to the next would take an eternity. And it might result in a book that was too variegated.

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