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[slacwriter]

I've got a question about getting back to an old writing project:

To make a long story short, I submitted a book proposal to a publisher in February 2010. Despite the publisher's good reputation for a quick turnaround, I didn't hear anything until December 2010. But it was accepted. A contract was issued and signed. By that time, though, I was in the midst of other projects AND in the middle of the academic year. I was unable to pick the project back up in December and just planned to pick it up when the spring semester ended in May.

Well, the semester is ending, and I'm returning to the project. I've got about 80% of the promised word count, but in relatively early draft form. To be honest, I don't remember exactly what's there, and I'm not sure, anymore, if the structure that I had started with way back when was the right structure, anyway.

So, any advice about delving back into an old project? Should I just commence writing some of what I know is missing? Should I re-read everything first? Should I re-discover the argument and re-outline before re-reading?

Any advice would be greatly appreciated. I've never let a project go this cold before picking it back up again. It's not that I'm disinterested. I'm very interested. I'm just dealing with a different kind of inertia.

[polly_mer]

The first thing I do is reread what I have written and check the notes that I left for myself the last time I was actively writing on this project.

I then pull up the couple of very important sources and review them.

Third, I do a quick literature review to see what has changed in the past couple of years.  I particularly look to see if the people who wrote the very important sources have done anything new.  I also dig through my notes from conferences from the past couple of years to see if I saw any good talks related to this project.

Then, I start filling in the gaps and rewriting the things that obviously aren't still good because too much time has passed.

Good luck!

[cranefly]

One thing that I find very helpful is to re-read with a pen and paper (or open file) ready: for every single paragraph, I write one short sentence about what the paragraph's purpose is (supporting evidence for previous? to introduce a topic? etc.). Once that's done, looking at the list of paragraph puposess usually helps me to re-arrange things in a more sensible order, to cut unnecessary paragraphs, and to re-focus.