The problem with the book at the moment isn’t coming up with 8K more words to put in the manuscript. No, that would be easy. It’s finishing it that’s the challenge.

Yes, those are two different things. One means you can just throw words into the file. The other means you have to bring every single small section to an intelligent conclusion, make sure all your interchapter references are correct (and that they actually exist — I found a reference to a set of breathing meditations that aren’t there yet), create the bits that are currently marked with [insert info here], and check that everything in the detailed outline you submitted is actually in the book in some form or another. Plus be brilliant while doing it all, making deep observations and providing a solid and inspiring structure to facilitate someone’s spiritual experience.

(And I wondered why I was having an anxiety attack on Wednesday? All this, plus no time to practice an astonishingly difficult Beethoven symphony that I really need to work on. I hate feeling unprepared and lame, and that’s exactly how I’m feeling at orchestra these days.)

I’ve just taken the time to go through the MS file and make a handwritten list in my notebook of each thing that has to be added, rewritten, polished, inserted, and so forth.

Five pages of notes later, I am grimly unamused. (Of course, I also discovered that I was further along in certain places than I thought I was. That’s a good thing.) So for the next week, I’ll be going through the list item by item. I’ll fix something, cross it off the list, go to the next thing that needs to be done, do it, and so on.

I’ve started by deleting a bunch of stuff that didn’t go anywhere. (Great ideas that sort of wandered into a corner and stood staring at the paint. And no, they’re not gone forever: they’ve gone into the Deleted Stuff file in the ESTC folder. I don’t throw anything away. You never know what will come in useful for an article or a future book.) Deleting after adding some writing earlier today means that the MS count currently stands at 41,584, which at least isn’t lower than it was when I closed up shop on Wednesday. And I still have an hour to work.

It’s no longer about the word count. (Well, to be honest, it’s never been about the word count; word count is just the only way I have to judge how much of the book exists.) Now it’s all about how much work I can get done in order to to make it the best book it can be before it leaves my hands on November 1.

On to item #2 to be handled.