Sobriquet 52.2

Although I somehow managed to forget to post a "for tomorrow" assignment last night, I still had a pretty good idea of what I wanted to do today. And, while I did wake up congested and a bit achy, I did sit down to write and I did manage to push my way through a bit more of my Disgrace chapter. And, like yesterday, it took me a very long time to write relatively little. It often strikes me that the bulk of the work is really in the blank spaces between the typed text, finding ways to pull words out of the nothingness and stringing them together. And that conjuring of words, that forging of order out of chaos is simply not seen in the end product. Books feel so smooth, so polished, that the strain of writing them is often forgotten in the act of reading them. Which, in the end, is probably a good thing. Still, that's one of the nice things about this blog: I like the fact that somewhere I can document that strain, that a reader can perceive the length of the process and the scope of the effort simply by looking at the string of posts. I like knowing that, in some way, the blank space on the pages won't be forgotten.

For tomorrow: Read a bit of criticism, transcribe notes on Elizabeth Costello or, if possible, add a bit more to the Disgrace chapter.