The Detailed Plan

You should have a detailed plan of when you will finish the book-length project that you are always writing. Basically, this is a list of chapters with dates of completion. There is no way that you will actually follow the plan in its first incarnation. Instead, you will be constantly revisiting it, changing dates backwards and forwards, realizing that c must be written before b, or f before e, that g took you less time than you anticipated. I'm always revising my plan, especially at the early stages when the identity and order of chapters is much more fluid. Today, for example, I shifted the focus of an unwritten chapter and that threw the order of everything else out of whack. I had to find a way of keeping the Lorca chapters together even though the argument places Lorca at several separate places in the book. I came up with a new plan, which is more or less this:

Preface (Finished January 1)
Acknowledgements
1. The Paradoxes of Spanish Intellectual History (March. 30)
2. Zambrano, Valente, and Counter-Reformation Poetics (Begun. Finish by April 30)
3. Play and Theory of Lorca’s Duende: Nation and Performance (June 30)
4. Lorca and Contemporary Spanish Poetry: Absence and Presence (Oct. 30)
5. The Persistence of Memory: Antonio Gamoneda and the Late Modernist Habitus (finished)
6. Las ínsulas extrañas: The Latin American Connection (Aug. 30)
Apocryphal Postscript (Nov. 30)
Bibliography

Final ms.: Dec. 31, 2010.

It's probably not going to happen this way. I'm sure it's overambitious. On the other hand, allowing too much time for each chapter is not advisable at this point.