Getting Cross With An Author

There’s a section in this book when I am explaining how to spot someone is quite clearly not an Underminer. It’s all very well creating complex definitions and making up examples, but there is nothing like a real life version of the very essence of non-Underminedness (new word alert!) to be able to draw on. The example comes from a book that I thought was excellent until I reached the last two chapters – I don’t think that’s enough to give it away – at which point it collapses into a sort of prone submission to the system, not just acting symbolically but actively attacking the very people who are Underminers.

To say it made me cross when I first read it is an understatement. Near the end of the penultimate chapter I wrote, “No it doesn’t, fool!” in the margin, and on the next page scrawled, “Crap! No way can you get 100% reduction + a viable economy. Greenwash again.”

And so on.

It was shockingly easy to pick a three paragraph extract apart, and that’s the saddest part – the writer (actually there are two, but one of them only writes the slightly “tougher” bits) is so confident of his agenda that there is no attempt at subtlety. I wasn’t big, and I wasn’t clever: I didn’t have to be.

I don’t think the author will take to the analysis kindly, but as will become very clear when it becomes public, there’s no point being nice to people who are actively trying to keep things as bad as they are – it only encourages them.

A New Chapter

Finally, the monster chapter is finished! I’ve just done a quick tot-up and it’s 14,378 words, give or take none. This is a long chapter – far longer than I first thought it would turn out, but once I got stuck into the later Tools of Disconnection then I realised they had to be done properly or not at all.

But it’s not the number of words that matters; and for all that I think it’s ok as a piece of writing as well. The test was whether I wanted to keep writing once I had finished, and apart from a few hours drinking an extra coffee and cleaning around the house, it was onto the next chapter with a skip and a jump. It does help that for each chapter I’ve written a few notes in advance, and as the current chapter is in progress ideas start to get moved around, trasferred to different chapters and things grow organically across the scope of the book.

So, two chapters down; three more to go in the first half of the book, then the really fun stuff starts – the undermining itself :-)

Getting Into A Routine

The reason I have managed to make significant progress in the last couple of days is because of something that has sorely been lacking in my life recently: routine. With so many conflicting and time-consuming things pulling at my daily work window the one thing that has suffered most is the thing that actually takes the most time – writing this book. The typical book varies from 80,000 to 120,000 words, although an increasing number are hitting the 150,000 or even 200,000 word mark, for reasons it would be unfair for me to suggest.

But all these words take a long time to write, not in the sense of typing them into a document (I wrote up to here in about 90 seconds) but researching, composing and finally submitting to “paper”. This morning, for instance, I had to flick through 3 different books and an online PDF of another just to arrive at a quotation that provided a good summary of the point I was trying to get across. That took a good 40 minutes. That wouldn’t have been possible without a routine, which is why, as from yesterday, my new routine consisted of ignoring everything else around me from the moment the rest of my family left the house (including calls of nature!) and just getting down to the business of writing for about an hour and a half. However much I have written up to then will be how much I write on Underminers for the whole day. It’s not a huge amount of time, but it’s long enough to make significant progress over a longer period of time, and short enough to leave me wanting to write more, which is always the best state to be in the next time you start.

Of course I am still hauling my way through the Tools of Disconnection, but well into the last third. I might even finish Chapter Two by next week.