“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


Friday, September 9, 2011

Hyperobjects Liveblog

Well I've never done this before: liveblog writing a book. What the hey. There's a first time for everything.

But I have written a book in about four weeks. Ecology without Nature took five and The Ecological Thought took three. There was a good deal of tweaking after that but the bulk was done in those times.

I think the thing about writing at a speed is very much how Graham describes it. It just makes things better and more integrated. Now the thing is, you have to have something to say. And luckily I've been talking hyperobjects for just over a year, so I'm ready. I tend to wait until the raincloud is quite full, in other words. It's just better that way for me.

So I'm going to sketch something like the whole book today, based on my approach that I described in a previous post. Write the whole thing as a three-page document then just keep on adding sentences.

My first discovery is that this wants to be a book in two parts rather than three chapters. That's the first time that happened. But there's such an easy division between “hyperobjects” proper and “the time of hyperobjects,” which also mirrors the age of asymmetry I've been talking about for a while.

1 comment:

Ted said...

I'm really glad to hear about this method of writing: waiting until the cloud is full, and then pouring it all out in a burst. All of the advice I read about writing a dissertation is to write it slowly, chipping away a little bit per day. But it seems that as my own habits play out, I'd do best to just write a chapter in a long burst and then revise it later (I'm sure my adviser will be more than happy to give me plenty of things to revise...)