I sent the revised manuscript to my editor on Friday.

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I cut about 15%, and got it back under 100,000 words. Most of the cuts were stylistic, tightening up the prose, eliminating redundancy, and taking down what I think of as scaffolding– the signposts, the repetition that is an artifact of writing in chunks, the stuff you write in order to figure out what really matters.

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There are about 20 pages I just cut wholesale, and can become its own article. There’s always the temptation to say everything you can in a book, and it’s an impulse I have to resist. You have to remind yourself that this is not the last opportunity I’ll have to talk about this set of issues, and it’s important for the book to have a narrative coherence. Better to tell one story that people will remember, than try to tell five stories that will leave people muddled.

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So with luck this’ll be the last substantial round of revisions, and it can move on to the next stage.

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While I’d like this to move along, I also have the strong feeling that this is not my last word on contemplative computing, but just the beginning. There’s going to be a lot more to say, in a variety of different channels.