The second day of stealth (june 22) went very well. I got up at 6:45, showered, brewed espresso and drank it, added eleven-hundred words to my document by 9 am. I am about half-way done, with the completed portions all in more or less "antepenultimate" prose. Most of that was copying and pasting salvageable material from a separate but messier document, but still, it needed to be done.
You would have thought that my chapter would have prepared its defenses a little better and been ready to put up a fight, but it did not. The aim of the "stealth attack" is to get a surprising amount of work done in a short period and thus gain leverage on a project. I recommend doing this on a chapter than is not very well developed yet and has been nagging at the back of your mind for a while. The next stealth attack will be on the chapter that I have least idea about right now.
The stealth attack is not incompatible with the idea that you should work regularly and slowly, producing scholarship by gradual accretion of days worked. I still do that too. It is simply a cognitive adjustment in which I reserve a few days for specially intense work and substantial, efficient progress. Perhaps I feel I simply cannot write the book without a few of these ambushes.
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