{"id":1198,"date":"2010-06-08T16:52:38","date_gmt":"2010-06-08T20:52:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bluepyramid.org\/storey\/?p=1198"},"modified":"2010-06-08T16:52:38","modified_gmt":"2010-06-08T20:52:38","slug":"80-of-the-best","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/bluepyramid.org\/storey\/archives\/1198","title":{"rendered":"80% of The Best"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>With the session just finished, I am officially eighty percent done with <em>The Best of All Possible Worlds<\/em>.  I have but two weeks to finish it, with the 21 June deadline and the first day of summer looming large in my vision.  However, I have almost no distractions or outside obligations to worry about as I approach the deadline and have been writing at a faster clip than perhaps even I realize.<\/p>\n<p>For example, I just realized that I have written 233 pages of the book (it is 305 total at present) in the last 40 days, or just shy of 6 pages a day <em>every single day for forty days<\/em>.  Of course, these days have been punctuated with two- or three-day spells of writing nothing at all, including weekends like the last weekend Em was in town before Africa, the last weekend Greg was hosting people at his late mother&#8217;s place, and the last weekend Stina &amp; Dav would be in town before Stina goes to England (two, one, and zero weekends ago, respectively).  So even though the average is just shy of six\/day, that includes many zeroes, meaning that when I&#8217;ve set down to work, I&#8217;ve been as productive on this work as anything I&#8217;ve ever done in my entire life.<\/p>\n<p>Which is exciting.<\/p>\n<p>Despite a lot of early doubts about whether this book even really &#8220;works&#8221; in some sense (it&#8217;s by far my most experimental effort to date), this last third of the book is convincing me that I have little to worry about in that department.  I still think a full reading is necessary to be sure, but maybe not the two I initially budgeted before I&#8217;d know.  In any case, that euphoric excitement about finishing the project and then being able to actually realize that people will be reading it soon is setting in.  Oh baby so tasty.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve been living life too, though sparely, mostly through the aforementioned weekends.  I&#8217;m going to sum up some of my personal, non-political encounters below in a sort of good-bad dichotomy as follows:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Recommended:  The yellow fever vaccine, which I got a week ago, the first shot I can ever remember having with absolutely zero side effects.<\/li>\n<li>Not Recommended:  The typhoid fever vaccine, which I got yesterday, which has brought me the most intense pain I can remember having in this lifetime.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>Recommended:  The movie <i>Following<\/i>, which I watched via Netflix in a pain-induced stupor from said vaccine above.<\/li>\n<li>Not Recommended:  The movie <i>Please Give<\/i>, which I watched in a nearly empty theater on Friday and enjoyed before it devolved into a ringing endorsement of capitalist superficiality.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>Recommended:  Wise and Otherwise, which we played with Fish, Madeleine, Ariel, and Michael at the latter&#8217;s place on Saturday night to endless aching of stomachs from too much laughter.<\/li>\n<li>Not Recommended:  Dungeons and Dragons, which was played most of the weekend in Connecticut, which I found to be a slow analog way of playing about ten minutes&#8217; worth of Dark Age of Camelot or World of Warcraft.  The company and enthusiasm therein helped mitigate this, but the game itself was disappointing.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>Recommended:  Being able to Skype with one&#8217;s wife across the Atlantic Ocean, enabling both talking and a small grainy amount of seeing despite the vast distances between.<\/li>\n<li>Not Recommended:  Still having two months to go before one sees one&#8217;s wife in person.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>With the session just finished, I am officially eighty percent done with The Best of All Possible Worlds. I have but two weeks to finish it, with the 21 June deadline and the first day of summer looming large in my vision. However, I have almost no distractions or outside obligations to worry about as [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48,32],"tags":[5,72],"class_list":["post-1198","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-a-day-in-the-life","category-telling-stories","tag-a-day-in-the-life","tag-telling-stories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/bluepyramid.org\/storey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1198","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/bluepyramid.org\/storey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/bluepyramid.org\/storey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bluepyramid.org\/storey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bluepyramid.org\/storey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1198"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/bluepyramid.org\/storey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1198\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1199,"href":"http:\/\/bluepyramid.org\/storey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1198\/revisions\/1199"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/bluepyramid.org\/storey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1198"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bluepyramid.org\/storey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1198"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bluepyramid.org\/storey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1198"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}