It’s been a while since I did one of these, so here’s your book progress update for the last couple of weeks, with the obligatory dog picture. This is probably the halfway point for the first draft, more or less.
Introduction
Current Revision: 1
Total Words: 430 (dialogue only)
Chapter 1: Particle-Wave Duality
Current Revision: 5a
Total Words: 5,279
Chapter 2: The Uncertainty Principle
Current Revision: 7
Total Words: 4,499
Chapter 3: The Copenhagen Interpretation
Current Revision: 2
Total Words: 4,801
Chapter 4: The Many-Worlds Interpretation
Current Revision: 3
Total Words: 4,869
Chapter 5: The Quantum Zeno Effect
Current Revision: 2
Total Words: 3,263
Chapter 6: Quantum Tunneling
Current Revision: 1
Total Words: 3,546
Bonus Context-Free Dog Dialogue: “That’s nice and all, but I’m not interested in microscopic bunnies. What has quantum tunneling ever done for me?”
The Zeno chapter is short, but it’s not as complicated a subject as some of the others. It’s kind of cool, though, and I thought of a good dog dialogue to go with it, so it gets elevated to full chapter status. I have comments from Kate on it that I need to incorporate, but it’s in a reasonably good state.
The Tunneling chapter is very rough– I just finished banging out the first draft yesterday. It’s also a little short, but will certainly get longer, as it needs some more dog material, and I know there are some bits that are still confusing. It might also make more sense to bump it up to Chapter 3, and push the interpretation stuff down, but I’m going to leave it where it is for now.
Total Word Count: 26,687. That includes some notes to myself, reference information, and probably 500 instances of “really” that need to be deleted, but it’s almost certainly past half of the contractually obligated 40,000 words, and the current mental outline calls for 11 chapters plus an introduction. So we’ll call this the midway point of the first draft.
With that in mind, I’ve started reading over what I’ve got so far, to check continuity– making sure I don’t have two contradictory explanations of anything, making sure I use similar words to describe similar phenomena, etc. The good news is that I don’t hate it. The bad news is that that means we’re still in the early chapters of “Mr. Earbrass Writes a Pop-Science Book”…
The dog picture might be a little hard to figure out, but this is the “play bow” also known as “Stop typing at the computer, and let’s do something fun.” It’s hard to get a picture of it from straight on.