As usual, Christmas/NYE has kinda crept up on me. A couple of weeks ago I started getting anxious about the essentially two weeks of low to bugger all productivity over the holidays that would bring progress on the book to a standstill (not that it feels like it’s been moving at much more than snail’s pace this year, anyway) but after reflecting on my year and the project I’m feeling more at ease.

I’ve been working on this book for 13 months now which is frightening, but combined with everything else I’ve done in 2012 — full time work, getting married, a month overseas on honeymoon, and trying to maintain a life on weekends — I think I’ve made decent progress on something that has been, at best, a hobby. I’ve felt frustrated at times that I haven’t been able to just concentrate on book five continuous days per week (apart from a couple of intense mid-semester breaks when I barely left my study) but that’s life.

In order to make sure I enjoy the holiday period and not stress out about not Getting Things Done, I planned out the last fortnight so I could get the book up to a good position for a fresh re-start in early January. As it stands today, I’ve completed first drafts of over half the chapters and have pretty comprehensive frameworks laid out for the rest. One of the early chapters will need a complete re-write but the rest of the first drafts are reasonably solid versions of what they’ll probably end up looking like by final draft. It seems that no matter how well I tried to plot out the whole structure of the book, the further I get through the draft the more I find I need to go back and alter everything that’s come before it.

Anyway, this morning I closed my manuscript file for the last time, backed it up comprehensively as has become my obsessive habit, and now I’ll walk away for the rest of the year. Bris Vegas for family Christmas and Tassie for new year. We are the 1%. See you in 2013.