It’s been a little while since I posted an update on the book. Fear not, good people, this does not mean there has been no progress. In fact I managed to stick to my thirty or so pages a day in editing and actually finished getting through the whole thing yesterday. As with all writing, I could keep changing it forever with minor tweaking, but forced myself to leave as much of it alone as I could stand, just changing and revising parts that really annoyed me. So it was a relatively pleasant experience, surprisingly.

The task ahead now is to rewrite entirely the introduction and conclusion, which at the moment stand as detailed “thesis” style documents. I have decided with the Conclusion to make it more of a postscript, incorporating a discussion of We Can Be Heroes and Summer Heights High (instead of boring chapter summaries which I am going to delete – oh so bold!). Because then the last section of the Conclusion, which I read for the first time in some time yesterday, I actually quite liked and will leave it as the ending. The Introduction needs vastly reworking also, with the main aim of making it less boring. I think it can be a lot sharper than it is right now. That will be next – probably the job for January.

It’s funny…I am finally starting to think of it more as a book now, rather than a thesis. I know I was supposed to think of it as a book all the way along but that never really happened for me. Finally, also, after eighteen months I am able to read it in an objective way, perhaps finally separating from the emotional and weighty task of completion, which was such a milestone. The telling moment was when I found myself actually enjoying reading it, and thinking, “this might be interesting after all!”