Conversion

2.5 hours writing, 1 hour reading, 1 hour emailing, page count = 147 (at 300 words/page), 164 (in final format)

Up until now, I've been calculating page count by taking the total number of words in the text (not counting footnotes or bibliography) and dividing by 300, on the assumption that a double-spaced page is about 300 words. Turns out that when I format the manuscript according to Berkeley guidelines (1.5" left margin, 1" right, top, and bottom margins, 12-point font, double-spaced), the average page is more like 270-275 words. Starting today, I'll switch over to counting actual pages in the manuscript, which is now formatted according to Berkeley guidelines. I figure I'll still need to add about 60 pages to have a complete draft by November 30th, bringing the total, in the final format, to around 215-220.

In terms of writing, I focused on three things: updating references to current writings on 19th-century civil wars in Colombia, of which there's been a bumper crop in the past five years; drafting a few ideas for the conclusion; and threading a story about Antioquia through Chapter 3 on critical antecedents.

For this last task, I read some about Antioquian economic development in historical context. By 1936, for example, the state was producing 46 percent of the country's coffee, at a time when overall coffee production had skyrocketed. I'll need to say something about mining and manufacturing, both of which were economic drivers in the period leading up to La Violencia.

In terms of reading, I also worked on the 1950s, and learned about the role of the U.S. army in the development of the Colombian army during that period, before, during, and after the military dictatorship. Colombia was the only Latin American country to send troops for the Korean War, and the experience was apparently an important one for further developing army professionalism.

I did a bunch of follow-up emails from my trip. I'm also logging an hour or two each day, not counted here, in my job search and volunteer project. The red-eye and jet lag did a number on my sleep patterns today, but by the weekend I should be back to normal. In the meantime, as my monitor and fellow writer Val put it in her comment yesterday, "WORD COUNT, BITCHES!"