Spent most of the day writing. This is the fourth or fifth time I've had to write a new introduction, and if I didn't have copies of each earlier edition on hand, I'd not recognize the new ideas, let alone differentiate them from someone else's words.
I imagine (pure fantasy on my part) that writers of fiction do not have this problem. Oh, they have editors and I know that Jo Rowling cares deeply about her audience. No one is going to look at a novelist and tell them to reincorporate, reindex and otherwise reorganize and revamp the same twenty pages. I'm citing the same fellow scholars, leaving the same places open for the material I need from the (still not arrived) microfilm... hopefully I've cast matters in a new angle that will appease the powers that be.
#3 offered the very good suggestion of looking at other introductions, pulling paragraphs that really flow and work - or, as I put it, "the ones where you want to underline every word" - and use them as models. Unfortunately I have yet to find an introduction that I really enjoyed, that flowed and did a lot for me, that ran for more than three or four pages. Thus I suspect that what I have would not meet my reading and underlining standards, but will probably please said powers that be very much.
So (reasons my brain) the introduction is kind of serving as a reversal of the three Norns in Wagner's The Ring of the Niebulungs: it tells the whole story right over again from the beginning even before the beginning has actually happened.
Words Written Today: seven hundred and two
Words Written Saturday: six hundred and forty
Lessons Graded: one
Books on Floor: twenty-three
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