Today we got up rather earlier than usual and were breakfasted and seated at the desk at 7.46 precisely. Yes, yes in pjs. It’s a habit now.

We were pretty determined to break the back of the last section by lunch time. And we did.

Today’s piece of work was focused on the literature review. We’ve written about literature work before, and we didn’t want to repeat ourselves. Not good for the reader to get too great a sense of déjà vu from one book to the other. But of course, I’ve blogged a lot about literature work too. In fact I’ve blogged two actual literature reviews. We decided that we would use some of this blog material in today’s section, but we’d reframe it so that it reads differently.

This was not as straightforward as it sounds. Converting blog posts to a book manuscript is not a simple matter of cut and paste. The blog is more informal and sometimes more repetitive than we want the book to be. So even though there is some economy in using something that already exists, it’s also a bit of a pain to rewrite it.

We were pretty close to done by midday and time for lunch.

Because we’d decided to go out for dinner tonight, we had to eat in the apartment today. The kitchen is equipped with a shiny stainless steel stove-top with two giant restaurant style wok burners. However only a small frypan and saucepan have been provided for cooking, so lunch required a bit of improvisation.

Omelette, tofu and greens. But it wasn’t, by her own admission, Barbara’s finest cooking moment. However it was edible enough. Just not the very tasty little treat we’ve come to expect from lunch. It was quite sufficient to sustain us to finish off this section by 3 this afternoon.

We have written over 12000 words since we’ve been here. While this is not as productive as our Singapore writing marathon, where we managed about 4000 words a day, doing this amount is OK. This book requires more new thinking than the journal book did. Because we are just beginning, we have also had to set up the various types of texts we want to include in the book. Now we have them, we should save a bit of time from now on.

Tomorrow Barbara goes. We will have a couple of hours in the morning to look at what we’ve done and put in some place holders where additional material is needed. We’ll also make a list of where we think we are up to, so that when we start again at the end of May we can just get cracking on the next section.