luciab | I can't imagine....

what it must be like to write an entire book. I mean, besides the fact that I have absolutely no ideas about what kind of book I'd write, or the first vague notion of a plot (I know, that doesn't stop a lot of people, but I try to be a little bit different) or how to write dialog or any other those details, just the sheer enormity of it astounds me.

I just finished a 17-page paper for a class, and also it's the basis for the paper I'm handing in for another class. It will actually be a combination of papers one and two: one was mainly about ink, but also had to discuss preservation issues. Paper two was about paper and parchment and how they react to the ink and how the combination should be preserved. So I started last night on combining them, and damn. I keep finding sentences that need to be rearranged, or paragraphs that need severe editing, and I wonder-- how does anybody ever got DONE? Seems like you could re-read and edit, and re-edit, forever. And I know from my painting experience, if you keep on doing that too long, everything turns to mud and it's a big amorphous mass. Or mess.

Not to mention the fun of combining two things; since I had to write about preservation in paper one, that meant I had to write about what the ink was ON that should be preserved, so I had to cover the same ground twice. I did my damnedest to not repeat myself, which means that I managed to come up with a few things the second time around that I really liked, and the second one is more extensive. And the two papers are necessarily organized differently so I'm having a hell of a time. I guess I thought it would be a matter of inserting, and wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am. So to speak.

Once I get them combined, I'm also using that as the basis for my class presentation on the paper-and-parchment paper. Maybe. That just needs to be a few minutes, so it probably doesn't make a lot of difference which version I use.

I've got my apple pie made to take to