Actually, I think I already made that joke. Oh, bother. I can’t be arsed to look it up.
I finished the first, rough draft of Chapter 6 late last night. The final section and conclusion came pretty quickly over a couple of days, in part because I wound up cutting some of the smaller sections, at least from this chapter.
Most of today I goofed off. I spent a good three hours playing NHL 2K9 and Mario Kart on the Wii, and otherwise spent the day sitting on my duff. After dinner I finally brought myself to read through the forty pages of my first draft.
I cut about four pages from the introduction, mainly because I copied wrote them back before I realized this chapter needed to be split in two. Since a good chunk of the introductory section came from an article on the federalization debate, and I decided to make the federalization debate a chapter unto itself, I cut a big swath of the introduction and pasted it into the first draft of Chapter 7. Then I went through the rest of the chapter, made changes as appropriate, corrected a couple of typos, and decided it was suitable for the time being. It wound up being thirty-eight pages with the additions, which included another paragraph or so in the introduction so it makes sense in light of the way I had to rework this chapter and where I split it.
So, that puts me up to 253 pages through Chapter 6, plus the first four pages of Chapter 7.
At some point this weekend, maybe tomorrow, I’ll sit down and figure out how to incorporate the archival and other sources I collected last year into my first article so I can call it Chapter 7. I have no clue how long it’ll take to do that and write the actual draft. The last chapter I thought would be based principally on something I wrote before wound up taking me the better part of two or three weeks, although I wasn’t working straight through that entire period, plus I was cribbing from a seminar paper.
By contrast, at least this next chapter corresponds substantially to an article I actually published, which means it’s been extensively edited and vetted. Still, there’s probably scads of sources I still need to incorporate, and I’m also going to need to figure out a good way to carve out new sections for it. I don’t relish the thought of having to read carefully through my article plus my notes for about 150 sources, then figure out how to organize the sections and where to incorporate new material. It also means I have no clue how long the chapter will run (fifty or sixty pages?), though that’s less of a concern. But, once I get through the requisite pre-writing, I can knock this out relatively quickly, I hope.
Of course, there’s the irresistible pull of the Wii and other diversions …
