Ah, SUCCESSIVE APPROXIMATION, my old friend

You may recall that last week that last week my publisher (fellow Lichtenbergian Jeff Bishop, of Boll Weevil Press) showed up on my doorstep with three proof copies of Lichtenbergianism: procrastination as a creative strategy.  You might be wondering why you can not yet give me money.

First of all, I was literally packing to drive to north Georgia to attend Alchemy, the fall Burning Man-style event of which I am part of leadership.  I barely had time to squee before hitting the road.

Second of all, despite having squads of people read over it with a fine-toothed comb, there were more than two dozen corrections that I found in my close reading of it. Frustrating, of course, but that's why we have proof copies, ne-ç'est pas?

Almost none of the corrections were typos—they were matters of spacing or formatting or fixing unclear writing, things that my close readers were not likely to have discovered, and which I wouldn't discover unless forced to take one more look at the book.

[The silliest correction happened at the burn, when Lichtenbergian Turff was proudly reading over his foreword and we noticed that I had misspelled foreword as FORWARD.  I halfway considered leaving it in as a Lichtenbergian joke.]

So once again SUCCESSIVE APPROXIMATION saves the day: you put something out there in the universe, and the next time you squint at it, it's not right.  You tweak it.  Over and over you tweak it until it's as good as it's going to get.  And then you ABANDON it.

That's where we are today: I have just sent the corrected proofs back to Jeff, and now it's a matter of waiting for it to be available.  Trust me, you'll be the first to know when you can give me money.