Thursday, January 04, 2007

Movement History Site Update

Just posted another of the infrequent updates to my Movement History project site. Here it is:

At the time of my last update I was working on a substantial rewrite of Chapter 3 with a rewrite of Chapter 6 next in line. I had hoped to finish both by the beginning of December. However, the work on Chapter 6 involved adding more new material than I had expected, which consequently involved more research, so it was mid-December before they were done. I took printouts of both of those chapters with me when we headed down to southern Ontario for the holidays and had a look over them, and though both need to have a few tweaks and to have a few very specific bits of information added, I am quite happy with them. In reflecting on this past year of work, I realize that I have not produced as much new material as I had hoped because re-visioning and rewriting -- once for some stuff, twice for the rest -- took up so much of my rather limited writing time. Nonetheless, I feel I have moved ahead, because last year at this time I was groping for a cohesive, compelling approach to presenting the material, and I now feel I have found one. I now have an Intro, and Chapters 1, 2, 3, and 6, all in that form and relatively polished, and in the last couple of days I have begun writing Chapter 4. I may be underestimating yet again how long things will take or overestimating how much time parenting will leave me for this work, but I am hoping that this year will see me finish the majority of the writing that remains to be done on this project. As well, I also took time this past year to re-work my book proposal, itself a fairly substantial document, to fit the new vision for the project. I delayed sending it to a new publisher because of another option presented by a friend and ally of the project -- an option which was well worth trying but which has not resulted in any real contact, unfortunately. But that means that my proposal is ready to send off to the destination I previously had in mind, and I will do so some time in the next week. So I think it really is a happy new year for this project!


I also changed the frontpage article link on that site to "Blinded by Ideology: Why is Harper pulling the plug on Vancouver's Safe Injection Site?" by Peter Dodson, published at the Briarpatch Magazine site.

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