This is going well. I’ve been spending an hour every morning writing roughly four paragraphs (around 800 words). I’m giving myself some rather open tasks and letting my writing flow somewhat freely for now, and my plan for next week is to put myself under a bit of pressure. I’m going to try to write a thousand words a day, disciplined by five key sentences. Since the ideas I’m writing about are very familiar to me, and I’ve now got a good sense of my pace, I am giving myself an hour and a half to do it. Basically, 15 minutes per paragraph, so about half the time I would normally recommend for a writing moment.

Some of it will be rewriting things I’ve been working on over the past two weeks. If I’m lucky (and good) I will have drafted a 5000-word chapter of my book. It’s a book I imagine as consisting of five such chapters, framed with a 3000-word introduction and a 2000-word conclusion, so 30,000 words in all. It will be called simply How to Write Papers. I’ve been promising it it for years and it has only recently become clear to me why I haven’t finished it. Hopefully it will become so clear to me next week that all the remaining barriers will be gone.

Then I will try to say something less cryptic about it too.