the Grey - Writing progress - April 2025
April 2025 update
It’s been 20 years since I have been writing the Grey. A life with this book haunting me. If I reflect back even though it was on my mind pretty much constantly I only wrote it in specific moments of my life. Generally unpropmpted, rather an unconscious call towards the craft after I recharged my creative batteries. On the other hand as life goes on, responsibilities grow, and the world hijacks the dopaminergic reward system it became harder and harder finding myself in front of the laptop with the scope of submerging in my imagination and pull-up the words I need to finish this piece.
And so in 2021 I decided that I have to track myself and give myself productivity target to make sure that my life doesnt flow by and become old with still ~500k word to write. I would not be happy with myself if I die before I finish.
So here is a dashboard that I will update on a regular basis to track myself and share with you how things are going.
Expected completion date: October 13 2027
the Journey
It all started in 2000, I was young and naive, overwhelmed by emotions and hormones and I came up with a story of a guy that willingly gives up to his human emotions to become the arbitrer of faith. How convenient. Of course, that would only be the starting point for a lot of confusion and mischief.
The idea lingered as a few word stub full of hubris for a few years. In 2004 I started putting that on paper more consistently and over the course of ~2 years I jot down ~80k words. the vast majority of them are, obviously, garbage that needed to be rewritten completely.
After that first creativity sprint outburst I got entangled with work and the real world and my authorship dreams went in hybernation until 2010, where another book idea came to mind (the Mav, 20k words written in that period) but with that also the sense of guilt around doing nothing for the Grey. And since you can only truly write if the world around you is crumbling I got to face som e big changes in my life that pushed me to think deeply about the meaning of life and our role here in base reality.
In those ~4y I came with another ~100k words, and one of the pieces I am most proud of (Chapter XVIII, Battle of Gibraltar).
After that another long void. MBA plus new job captured in the immanence again and chained me there for 7 long years. Then at the end of 2021 I realized that I was letting my dream withering away paycheck after paycheck, project after project. My dopamine reward systems hijacked by the oiled frameworks of modern society. I stopped and looked at myself in the mirror. I would not, I could not accept to have all this beauty I have in my head to rest there, forever hidden. It seems that it has a meaning, a purpose.
I may sound arrogant, but worst case it just is only arrogant, but best case? I could miss adding to the choir of humanity something of value, so I got back to work. Put in ~160k words since then and started tracking myself systematically.
Current status is shown below. 74% complete. ~320k words written out of a forecast of ~430k. 13% of the total hase been revised and somewhat ready for Substack.
The novel has a total of 5 parts and 27 chapters. Below there is a breakdow by parts. Parts I-III are complete and vary between ~60% and ~10% revised. Part 1 requires the most work, with the 2 last chapter requiring full rewriting, but hey, It was 25 years ago, already the fact that I had the diligence to write down something was a huge achievement.
Part IV and V are the most emotionally and psichologically charged. All the themes built in Part I-III come to the final pivot to explode and collapse in one singularity. I think I have those clear in my mind. Storyboard is sketched. I just have to sit down and let them out to see where they bring me.
Writing Statistics
As I started tracking myself i discovered that there is value in studying metrics by writing session as I can pace progress in a structured way and reliably project typically date where I will terminate a chapter and allocate between revising and producing.
I started tracking systematically in late 2021. I track only writing sessions, meaning that I ignore days where I don’t write at all. When I revise I track my absolute word count and then net from the total the words eliminated.
My performance since late 2021 looks like this.
General stats as of April 2025
61 writing sessions since Q4 2021
140k total word written
Session median: 2.25k words
Session average: 2.28k words
25th/75th percentile: 1.2k/3k words
Session standard deviation: 1.28k words
Total day since tracking start: ~1’200
% of writing session of total days: ~5%
Days between writing session: ~19
Expected sessions to complete: 46
Expected completion date: October 13 2027