Tuesday 2 December 2008

How Does A Biblical Scholar Spend His Long Vacation? Book Writing in TTC Singapore - Part 7

The facade of the library from my apartment


This is my final week in Trinity Theological College, Singapore, working on my book. I must say I have grown to love this place. The library is a real pleasure to work in. With the semester break now on, the library is almost deserted and quiet.

The past 3 weeks or so have been productive for me. Not only I have done significant progress in my writing, I also have a clearer direction how the shape of the book will take. Should there be no more changes, there would be a total of 10 chapters of approximately 3,000-3,500 words for each chapter, a rather comfortable length for a chapter, giving a total book length of approximately 100-120 pages.



The stacks of the rather well-equipped library

I have done most of the groundwork for 8 of the 10 chapters, and hope to get another chapter done this week. The final chapter is to bring together all my argument in a coherent manner, and this would only be done at a later stage. For the next few months, I will be working on tidying up the flow of each of the chapters, and I anticipate this would take some months as my teaching load for the first semester of the 2009 academic year is really crazy and heavy.

Personally, I wish I have another month in Singapore to work on my book. But in any case, I am thankful that I have this 4-week short sabbatical, without which I would never be able to even set out working on the book.

5 comments:

Alex Tang said...

Excellent. I am glad you have some time to do some writing. We need more Asian writers.

Kar Yong said...

Thanks, Alex. I really wish I have more time here.

How do you write? I can't seem to be doing any writing back in STM :-)

Alex Tang said...

one word at a time :)

Perng Shyang Teng said...

Good to hear that you have a good progress in writing.

Kar Yong said...

Thanks, Perng Shyang