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 I approach the deadline and have been writing at a faster clip than perhaps even I realize.

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 every single day for forty days. 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’s place, and the last weekend Stina & 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’ve set down to work, I’ve been as productive on this work as anything I’ve ever done in my entire life.

Which is exciting.

Despite a lot of early doubts about whether this book even really “works” in some sense (it’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’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.

I’ve been living life too, though sparely, mostly through the aforementioned weekends. I’m going to sum up some of my personal, non-political encounters below in a sort of good-bad dichotomy as follows:

• Recommended: The yellow fever vaccine, which I got a week ago, the first shot I can ever remember having with absolutely zero side effects.
• 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.

• Recommended: The movie Following, which I watched via Netflix in a pain-induced stupor from said vaccine above.
• Not Recommended: The movie Please Give, which I watched in a nearly empty theater on Friday and enjoyed before it devolved into a ringing endorsement of capitalist superficiality.

• Recommended: Wise and Otherwise, which we played with Fish, Madeleine, Ariel, and Michael at the latter’s place on Saturday night to endless aching of stomachs from too much laughter.
• 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’ worth of Dark Age of Camelot or World of Warcraft. The company and enthusiasm therein helped mitigate this, but the game itself was disappointing.

• Recommended: Being able to Skype with one’s wife across the Atlantic Ocean, enabling both talking and a small grainy amount of seeing despite the vast distances between.
• Not Recommended: Still having two months to go before one sees one’s wife in person.