Ultimate Successive Approximation

Mercy.  At what point is it no longer SUCCESSIVE APPROXIMATION and is ABANDONMENT instead?

As you may know, I'm pushing to finish Lichtenbergianism: procrastination as a creative strategy by the end of July and have it published by Labor Day.  I began by printing out the 25,000 or so words I already had, putting them in a notebook, and tagging the pages/sections that needed to be written and/or completed.

That's a lot of sticky notes.  I'm kanban-ing my way through them — each is labeled with the section that needs work — by putting them on my monitor and tackling them in order, which is not to say I'm not leaving bare spots as I go.

Anyway, the chapter on RITUAL was largely written.  I thought. It had this huge explanation of the structure of RITUAL using the Hero's Journey as a model, and that was fine.  I've studied RITUAL for the last decade, so that part was easy to write.

But at some point in the last few months I had begun explaining RITUAL using a different structure, the structure of my Book of the Labyrinth, the blank book I'm filling up with meditative passages.  It made more sense and gave a better, often more concrete, understanding of the role of RITUAL in the creative process.

Rewrite!

The first part of this was not as difficult as you might think: I had already written a full version of this explanation right here on this blog.  All I had to do was to pull those posts into the word processor and edit it into a coherent section for the book.

The hard part was trying to include the important ideas I had in the old version.  I took a printout of the old chapter and highlighted those passages I wanted to keep and then literally cut them out.  I taped and crowbarred them in, and there they are, mostly.  The chapter is still a bit of a shambles.

But that's what GESTALT is for, ne-ç'est pas?  I'm going to let it sit there and annoy me for a while and move on to STEALING FROM THE BEST.

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