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Welcome to The Lotus Position, an intermittent collection of extempore navel gazings, ponderings, whinges, whines, pontifications and diatribes.

Everything is based on a Sample of One: these are my views, my experiences... caveat lector... read the Disclaimer

The Budapest Office - Castro Bisztro, Madach ter

The Budapest Office - Castro Bisztro, Madach ter
Ponder, Scribble, Ponder (Photo Erdotahi Aron)

Monday 9 June 2008

Why So Long?

Because if it were any shorter it wouldn't reach the end!

The Book has moved another step forwards: on Friday I finished the complete rip-it-up-and-start-again re-write of Chapter 10, which meant throwing away the 9,155 words already written. The ideas were OK but the prose/poetry was just a little bit purple (think: that horrible magenta highlight colour that makes your eyes water just by looking at it) so it had to go... all of it, unfortunately.

Now it's done - all 26,625 new and improved words later - I discover that it took four and a half months - which is rather a long time for a single chapter. But then 26k words is about a quarter of a standard paperback, so that means if "IT" were an ordinary book of about 100k words it would only... ah, slight difficulty with tenses here - what's the right tense for a hypothetical future conditional relative to a contra-factual prior state, as in "if I were to have been writing an ordinary book (which I'm not), the estimated time to forthcoming completion would have been likely to be..."? - would only be taking about 18 months to write, which isn't that bad.

Anyway, just so you know, including the 10k words lurking in the "Excised for re-use" and the "Under Development" sections, the whole thing is now about 189,234 words (as of Friday). There are still some gaps I know I need to fill in (a couple of back-story characters for The Trial, a bit more political intriguing and skulduggery, the description of the - newly invented - low-tech transparent-but-fair-and-anonymous jury voting system, and a few other bits and pieces) but we are back on the trail of making the corrections and amendments... The end is, if not nigh, then at least speculating on the possibility of nighness - all ~700+pp of it.

So! Onwards and upwards to Chapter 11

Must dash...

...Stuff To Write

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