I'm in New Delhi, and it's around 3 PM on Friday afternoon. Since my arrival in the wee hours of Wednesday morning, I've gotten very little sleep. But that's not the main thing. The main thing is that I'm really surprised that I'm having so much trouble getting a reliable internet connection, seeing as India is well-known for it's technology capability. I'm staying at the Oberoi Hotel -- a fabulously elegant place. But the hotel's wireless internet connection leaves much be desired. Basically, it works only intermittenly. I'm paying about $20 a day for 24-hour internet access. But my guess is that out of that 24 hours, I really only have access for maybe 3 hours, on and off. I also tried connecting through Compuserve dial-up, which I often use when I travel. But so far, I haven't been able to get connected because the connection keeps being dropped. Very weird.
On the plane with my client, we went over the proposal outline. We decided that it needed to be changed, so now the outline is already in its second revision and writing hasn't even started yet. The day after I arrived, we had an all-day meeting with other members of our proposal team to review and discuss each section of the outline, and to make writing assignments. The first draft is due on Monday, and then there will be another meeting on Tuesday to review and discuss the draft. I don't have any substantive writing assignments, although I've offered to work on a few small generic sections of the proposal. My real job is to review everyone else's work and shape it into my client's vision of what the proposal should say. What that really means is that I will probably have to rewrite and reorganize everything in time for the second draft which is due a week from today.
Today I tried unsuccessfully to take a nap, and now I'm looking through some of my client's old proposals to see if there is any material in them that we can recycle for this proposal. I'll also do some quick and dirty drafts of the generic pieces that I've offered to write.
I'm going to try to publish this post to the blog now, since the wireless connection has been fairly steady for the past half hour. Hopefully it will stay on long enough for me to get this posted.
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