taking a break from the sabbatical…

Heading into the city on the train today. Enough stuff piled up that needs to be taken care of in-person to justify the twenty-some-dollar train ticket. Plus there is a big faculty meeting today, and I figured I could earn some brownie points for showing up. Comes to meetings while on sabbatical!! So dedicated!!

I guess it's been a while since I've posted an update about the writing process. Things are going ok. I'm not smashing my daily word counts like I had been at the beginning - lately I've been just as likely to put in a 750 word day or an 825 word day as the 1100 - 1200 words I was knocking out in January. But I think that's ok, because I've been spending more of my mornings tweaking things that are already written, and thinking about the bigger picture stuff - including how the book is going to fit into the actual class it's being written for. So I've added some things like discussion questions for the chapters which hadn't been part of the original plan, and which take more thought than just writing.

I did take some time off from the book, but it was mostly intentional - a week to go to a conference, then a few days when the wife's Mom was visiting. It took a while to get back into the rhythm of working, but I'm still pretty happy with the progress overall. I passed the 40,000 word mark last night, and the book (as currently formatted anyway - paperback novel sized) is around 165 pages. Enough chapters are finished that I'm starting to drake the final touches - things like graphics and display-equations and whatnot - formatting stuff I've been putting off. My guess is, I'll start working seriously on those things in April.

In non-book-related news, I started back running the other day. It was 50º, so I suited up and did two ½ miles with a little 1-minute walk break in between. It was a little huffy-puffy, but not as bad as it could have been considering I've been away from it for 3 months or so. As my karmic reward for exercising, I came down with the flu less than 12 hours later. The universe can fucking suck it.