The Summer is Over (1) 

Next week I am returning to my teaching which leaves much less time to creative work.

Anaway, I started collecting materials for the next chapter of The Witness in the Den. My next witness is William of Rubruck who composed a fascinating report about his journey to the Mongols. Writing a new item includes four major stages: after collecting enough material, I look through my dosier and attempt to do some creative writing. It might be a sentence or a paragraph, bits and pieces. Then I estimate these pieces and either drop them or combine together. Later, I try to assesss what is missing to link the extracts into a unified text. Sometimes I research a particular item to make it eloquent. I also begin to check the citations and think about accompanying images.