Yippee. Today we wrote 3118 words, about half of the first chunk of the book. There are six or seven chunks in total, some of them much longer than this first one.

We began writing quite early today, at around 7 30 am. We were both up, breakfasted and ready by then, albeit still in our pjs. Two days running doing the not-dressed-yet thing. But hey, it seems to work.

We began with a clear idea of what we needed to do. Yesterday we’d generated a list of the content we wanted to include in this first chunk. So today it was a pretty straightforward task, we assumed, to just start at the top of the list and work our way through. And indeed, this turned out to be the case.

This first chunk of the book is about reading and notetaking. It’s something I’ve taught a lot, and also blogged about, so it wasn’t too hard to generate the words. It was more a case of us thinking together of the best way, and sometimes a new way, to present the information, rather than having to work out what needed to be said. We even found a way to insert a bit of talk about chick lit… no explanation now, you’ll just have to wait and read it.

The good thing is that we are well on the way to working out the formatting for each of the chunks. It’s a bit soon to be totally sure of how they will go but we do have some defined elements that will appear all the way through – strategies, stories, metaphors, identity insights.

We went at the writing pretty steadily till about midday but then a ghastly loud repetitive grating industrial noise from outside disrupted our thinking-talking-writing. No point trying to work through it so it was showers and off to lunch. We were at the point where we needed to think about what we’d done and whether there were any glaring gaps or things in the wrong place. And we reasoned that, since we might as well reflect in a pleasant environment, we might as well go back to the Chinese handpulled noodle restaurant for more soup.

Inspiration arrived with the garlic greens. We could make a small but important addition to the morning’s text. So, after lunch and a small altruistic contribution to the Malaysian fashion industry, and after a coffee with a couple of Australian academics working here, we headed back to the apartment. It then took us only ten minutes or so to add in the new piece.

It seems pretty likely that we’ll get a first draft of the first chunk completed by Thursday, leaving us Friday morning to sort out odds and sods.