Chapter 9 Complete

I’m going to have to check when I started writing Chapter 9. Hang on…oh dear, it was in March, which means it’s taken the best part of 4 months to write one chapter. I apologise for being crap. Ok, it’s 22 thousand words, which puts it in the “stupidly long” category, along with a couple of others. I just spent a day reading through it and making comments here and there, although the way I write is very deliberate and self-critical, meaning I don’t usually change much in the final edit. The thing that struck me was how exhausted I was just reading through the chapter.

That’s odd. Sometimes I look at a piece of writing and think how easy it seems to glide past; other times it feels clunky and needs ironing out to make it readable. This is neither – it’s just so dense with concepts I have struggled to work through and deliver onto the page that there is no way I could have made this anything but what it is. On the other hand there is something very different about this chapter. It doesn’t feel like undermining, more like rebirth. There is a definite arc to the plot, for that is what the second half of the book is. I don’t mean the kind of plot that might lead to a robbery, but something akin to a story arc, from the fundamentals of societal freedom, via some seriously hairy industrial destabilisation, stopping off to screw up the people who are pretending to sort things out, then into this chapter which is about rebuilding communities and the wider concept of Community.

The following chapter will be about us, as individuals. A shorter one, I assure you. Maybe.