This morning I took all the printed out copies of the essays written so far, put holes in the pages and labeled each so I could find the individual essays more easily, and put them into a three ring binder. There are enough of them now that I am having trouble remembering which things I've already written about and rather than 'waste' my time covering the same thing all over again, thought I'd best do a review of what has been written.
Plus all those essays have no page numbers and the stack of paper would have been extremely difficult to sort out if the heap had been knocked onto the floor and scattered. And I could see it happening!
You can maybe see from all the stickers along the edge of the binder that I have written quite a few!
Most of them are only a few pages long. Some of them will have photos inserted later but for the moment, unless the photo is crucial and I have one in my file, I'm keeping them to a minimum.
My eyesight isn't great (growing cataract, advancing age?) so I've been writing them in a larger than 'usual' font just to make it easier for me to read both on the screen and on the paper. I do my 'best' editing from the printed page - still - so a printed copy is going to be important. I can do 'easy' editing, like for this blog on the screen, but I still find 'serious' editing is best done in print.
I have no idea whatsoever how many pages there will be because the number of pages printed out is deceiving. I will not use a tiny font for publishing because I figure I'm not the only one who is, um, advancing in years, but it won't necessarily be the size I'm using for my own comfort.
As for the information written up so far, it is all over the map, so to speak. I am making zero effort to work in any kind of linear fashion, bowing to the non-linear reality of how designing a textile (matrix) works. But it will result in somewhat 'chaotic' reading, I think, so I have four rough categories and I may group the essays into those categories for easier access. OTOH, everything about weaving tends to overlap so maybe I should run with the non-linear approach? Dunno. Will decide when my editor begins to smooth the rough edges off.
At this point I have very little perspective, which is normal. Almost every writer I know of struggles with assessing their work in any meaningful way at this stage of the project. And frankly I need the input of other weavers to let me know if what I'm doing is actually assessible or too chaotic for words. Or concepts.
But it felt good to do even this tiny amount of organization. It is beginning to feel 'real'. And that a 'book' may result.
Maybe I'm just tired, or maybe even my sub-conscious realizes that it is more efficient to have a tiny amount of organization for this project, but they seem quiet this morning. So I'm going to go down to the loom and keep threading the new warp. Until they poke me again? Or maybe they will wait until I have a list of topics and we can both 'see' what needs to be addressed.
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