The hard part — though not necessarily difficult, just time-consuming — is having to build the references from scratch because they don’t exist. Or rather, you have to pull them out of the abstract and build them before you can work on the main piece. I try to work on it every day, because if I don’t, I can lose my place and get lost in all the layers and references involved. Sometimes I’ll make a quick video on my smartphone as a kind of bookmark, in case I have to step away from the project for more than a day or two.
