Progress Report
5600 words written so far this week.
Not bad.
Here is a paragraph I particularly liked. Copyright (c) 2010 John C. Wright. All rights reserved!
Between times he read, or watched, or had fictional conversations with library figments, to learn a bit about the history of what had happened while he slumbered. He soon found he could not trust anything presented to him from a library cloth. The systems were more interlinked and more heavily edited than in his day. Fortunately, Del Azarchel had a well-stocked library, and, since he was the world ruler, of course he could afford to read the stuff his own police forbad elsewhere.
Montrose decided then and there that a full library, one made of old-fashioned paper books with bindings, the kind that cannot be electronically re-edited at by anonymous lines of hidden code, was just as much a necessity for a free man as a shooting iron or a printing press.
Even so, hard print did not have search features, so he could not go back and find previous passages except by flipping pages and trying to remember which page said what. There was no way to shorten or expand paragraphs, or ask for additional information. He had to actually get up from his chair and look in another dumb book, called a dictionary, to get the meaning of a word he did not know. He also could not personalize any hard books in their font or lit-settings, or set the text in quotes to be read aloud by different voices, or even read aloud at all. It was like something from the Dark Ages. And the pictures did not move.
No wonder students back in the bad old days were bored.