It’s strangely unsettling writing a book without a title. Both American Dream On and The Best of All Possible Worlds were titles before they had any other content whatsoever. And Loosely Based was entitled on 12 June 2001 (as a working title that later became permanent), 17 days after I started that project. Which I guess gives me three days to come up with a title for this. It seems like there should be such fertile ground for the intersection of Uber and New Orleans, but I’ve just got nothing so far. It remains the Uber Book for the time being.

Here’s the status of the book, so far, posted here for the all-important public self-accountability that helps fuel my writing projects and make their deadlines real, as well as for my own process/posterity:
-Fourteen days of work.
-Five chapters (sections?) complete.
-12,421 words (~50 pages by normal metrics).
-Roughly maybe 10% of the book complete? Though this puts it on an unsettlingly long pace (~500 pages), but I guess overwriting and editing down is a good idea.
-Pace: 887 words/day (~3.5 pages/day).
-102 days till deadline.
-102,895 words at current pace by deadline (~412 pages).
-26 identified, usable vignettes that could still become chapters/sections.

It’s also weird to be writing non-fiction. And writing during the day. Though I’m writing in the guest room, which has a blackout curtain in the light, and no one is home during the day, so the effect is pretty much all the same. I also lost a lot of writing time from being sick for a good part of the last fortnight, so the pace should pick up.