Friday, September 21, 2007

That's a lot of paper!

Just a quick post tonight. The footy's on telly (Geelong v Collingwood) so I'm writing this during the ad breaks. Yesterday I printed what I've written so far and what I now have in my hands is quite a weighty tome. It's wonderful to be able to use that phrase!

How weighty, you ask?

At the moment the books are 666 pages in total. Yes, I know that's a sinister number. But it gets weightier! I have typed up the manuscript in tiny font to save paper. Tonight I reformatted the whole thing in the font size and page set-up stipulated by Lulu.com (where I am publishing it) and it came in at 1198 pages! Now just so you can get a sense of how long that is, Tolkien's entire Lord of the Rings trilogy is 1069 pages long. And I haven't even finished!

Of course, it a poor comparison because a lot of what I have penned is probably utter rubbish, but it nice to have so much done anyway.

I'm sometimes asked, 'How long to go?' To answer this, I have supplied a bar chart on the blog (just to the right). It shows how complete each chapter is. 99% basically means it's finished, pending any editorial advice I receive. The book is 49 chapters long and a lot of it's done as you can see. I have decided to divide it into three books. It's a practical decision. It's now too long to print as two.

The other thing to mention is I have also added a chat facility to the blog. If you have a question, or you see I'm online and on a crazy whim you decide to say hello, all you have to do is type your message into the little widget! It's that simple. No log-ins to worry about. Of course, you could pretend to be someone else and type in a nasty comment, but please bear in mind I am very sensitive and may cry should you upbraid me in any way.

I think I am on target to have the whole project wrapped up by Christmas. Hopefully everyone will be getting the same present from me!

Back to the footy now.