It's not really about wheels...

I've been hammering away at The Book. I'm happy to say I've made some progress. I'm sad to say it hasn't been in the parts of the book that need it most. That is to say, I've spent a lot of time tweaking parts for which I already have a Shitty First Draft. What I need to be doing is buckling down and writing Shitty First Drafts for the parts that I have notes for but no text.

At least I've been able to reconsider the structure of the thing. There's been enough work on the subject that I no longer need a chapter Inventing The Wheel: Chronology, and I can therefore collapse two chapters into one. Instead, I'll write the chapter, Wheels Are All Round But Not Necessarily The Same Thing: Dating Your Wheels Is More Complex Than It Seems. Or at least jam the discussion somewhere into The Book.

Really, the only chapters I have left are:

• The Introduction (write this last)
• Why Wheels At All, Really? (the Bear in the Book. OMG. I have over 100 pages of notes that are freaking me out. I need to just bite the bullet; I suspect they will condense nicely. I don't need to regurgitate everyone's take on Wheels, just summarize and refer. Right? Right.)
• Wheels Are All Round.... (as I write this post, I'm mentally condensing this chapter into a blurb and incorporating it into a Case Study Introduction section that I didn't know until right this minute I'd be including)
• Special Wheels: The class of Wheels that won't fit right into my overall organization of Wheels, but which make their own easily identified, tidy little class
  
• Case Study: The Necessity of Wheels
• Case Study: Variations in the Use of Wheels by Religion
• Case Study: Variations in the Use of Wheels by Ethnicity (possibly too uncritical a use of "ethnicity", but pretty sure this isn't the place to resolve the nature of the concept in historical archaeology)
  
• Conclusion: Aren't Wheels Cool? Future Directions in Wheels.

Hmmm. That looks like a lot. I'm confident I can get through the Case Studies pretty easily, as long as I don't think about stuff TOO hard, and go off on TOO many tangents. I need to do the Why Wheels At All chapter. That's my hangup right now.

And I'll get right on it, as soon as I've finished messing around with my Really Early Wheels chapter.