It's done DONE

Well, at long last (and it's a very long last - nearly four years since I pitched up in Budapest just to "finish IT off") - and despite the many, many impediments presented by a cold December Monday yesterday, the book, "IT" was finally uploaded to the printers and the order emailed.

It is done: the text, the design, the illustrations - all of it.

Except for the bits that aren't, whatever they might be: there's bound to be something.... for example, recent tribulations included (but were not limited to)

• Complete lack of internet chez nous (until Monday evening... "That's not a valid IP address..." [Thinks: but you gave it to me by DHCP!!!] "... I'll update/reset the database..."
• Death of the headset microphone when I finally got to Castro and could get online
• A typographic miscalculation by the printers in a page count
• Complete failure of printer's FTP site to be accessible to any browser (Firefox, Chrome, IE8)
  
• Unexpectedly appalling costs of hand binding (eschewing which then negated considerable expense and effort in attempting to productionise a "burnt in" title..."
• Und so weiter, und so weiter, und so fort...

But, it IS done.. all 720pp large pages (Royal Octavo... sort of - 234 x 156mm) of it (a few blanks to round things up nicely) - though I have admit that whilst certain bits still make my spine tingle the bulk of IT is just Stuff That I Did. (hmmm... if Stuff were more interesting that could make an interesting title for an autobiography).

So... in about a month's time it should turn up in hard-copy, at last...

Notice has been given on the apartment and so the last day of occupation should be 24th March 2010... home beckons (see thoughts on Home in "IT" for an explanation of that that feels like).. and then some new adventure... Soon it will be farewell to Budapest - a lovely city, hot in summer, cold in winter but always invigorating - and Hello England! again.

I'm not sure it's actually sunk in yet... perhaps when I have a volume in my hands. Now all I have to do is find an agent, get the car sorted for returning to Blighty, sort out immigration stuff, fix up my LinkedIn profile, get revenue generating (= "a job") and so on... but first I think I've earned a bit of a break - all I have to do is work out what do with it.

But that's just Stuff. Old Stuff. Coming soon - New Improved Stuff... with extra Stuffness.

It is done...

The proof-read. Only took 16 weeks (from 29th June to 20th October 2009). Just a bit more reading aloud (a bit behind with that - have been doing that in parallel) to catch up on and then it's all spell and grammar check, typesetting, printing...

When will it be finished finished? Pretty damn soon. Then home. I'm exhausted; I'm tired & broke, and I need a holiday. Nearly there....

But, if I say so myself, it's beautiful.

Shared the last of the cognac (left over from the great drunken celebration of completing the narrative) with Orsi, Reka and Janette to celebrate and now....?

Stuff. Just stuff.

Update on IT

Narrative finished 12th May; unresolved issues finally cleared up by 17th June; miscellaneous comments, potential improvements etc. in the Scratch column finally cleared up on the 29th June.

Now "all" I have to do is re-read it from the beginning and polish it up.

The recession will probably be over by then... so I ought to be able to find gainful employment after that!

Progressive Stuff

The Cliff Wherefrom I Hung

So, what did happen just as I was about to complete "IT".

Well, there I was, approaching the dénouement at last - I had perhaps an hour's more work to do - when it suddenly occurred to me that the screen on my laptop seemed a bit dim... this usually happens when it has switched to battery power and I thought that the power lead must have become unplugged.

But it hadn't! (can you feel the tension building)

I looked down at the power supply and saw - to my horror - that the little green light was no longer shining bright. This was my worst fear - death of the power supply!

Oh dear. Still under Rock's excellent 3 year warranty (thank you Rock for sending for the replacement hinge a while back) but it would take several days at least to get a replacement.

And then it dawned on me that the lights had gone out in Castro. Ah! A fuse has blown.

But, as it turned out, it must have been a very big fuse, because it wasn't just Castro that was affected... the rest of Madach ter seemed strangely dark... there was no sign of artificial lighting anywhere... it was quiet... too quiet.

It seemed that someone was trying to delay the completion... if necessary by darkening a substantial part of Budapest - though why I can't fathom. I struggled on on battery power (well, the laptop struggled on battery power, I struggled on on nervous excitement and tension... would the battery last?) hoping that the aged Lithium battery could hang on long enough that

a) I could finish
b) I could actually save the finished document before the laptop died.

I couldn't... I managed to shut the system down securely only seconds before it would have died, but IT was not yet finished. How long would it take for power to return? There was no way of knowing. I could only wait...

So I waited, the power came back on less than an hour later and I finished about five minutes after that (~14:22)... and then got very, very drunk and eventually (~21:00 and almost a whole bottle of cognac later) had to be helped home by Csaba. Don't really remember that.

As to why it was necessary to delay the completion for ~1 hr I guess I shall never know... maybe someone was just building the tension... by removing the tension (ha ha!).

Electrifying Stuff

IT'S DONE

Castro Bisztro and the author are pleased to announce the completion of IT - the book - the book you never thought would be finished. Yes I still have to correct and proof it but the story is complete. All 306,000 words of it.

I am now going to enjoy several very large cognacs.

And then a few more.

And later I'll tell you what happened just as I was about to finish (we call that a cliffhanger in the trade).

Satisfying Stuff!

*Nearly" Done

Yes, "IT" is nearly done (watch this space, seriously) - but I mean the story, not the whole project (still have corrections and proofreading to do but it will be the first time there has been an end-end story). However this post is not so much about literary achievement as nerdulent smugness...

As part of the aforementioned forthcoming proofing process the book will be checked for various, grammatical, syntactic, rhythmic, stylistic and other infelicities - such as over use of certain phrases and words and the use of words just too obscure to be easily digested.

To this end I wrote some concordance code - i.e. a program that works through the whole text and accumulates lists of all single words, all double word pairs and all triple words combinations and links them to the source text, which lists are then sorted alphabetically and placed in a spreadsheet (which links back to the text so that I can inspect individual occurrences).

Now, when I wrote the code, the sort algorithm was very simple - and slow. So I improved it with some cool tricks that sorted all three groups at once and did a few other neat things, but since I didn't really investigate sort algorithms even the improved code was slow - just not quite as slow as it had been (it's running in VBA as well): there's a note in the code to the effect that "by the time the book reaches 100,000 words this will be soooooo slow."

Now the book is >300,000 words. I started a concrodance running Saturday morning on the old, old 1.4GHz Athlon powered desktop PC knowing it was going to take an age, but even I was shocked. Eventually I discovered the sort alone took over 29 hours to finish (and tabulating the results into Excel took a further 8 hours or so), but even while it was running it seemed desirable to rewrite the code.

I'd found and implemented a QuickSort a long time ago, and decided to rejig it for the present purpose. It took a couple of hours, but after some preliminary testing (and still the other PC was chugging away, indirectly consuming gigatonnes of CO2 even as it performed a glacial sort) I was ready to try it out on "IT".

Everything sorted in about three and half minutes! Direct comparison showed that the new sort was 500x faster, but after allowing for the fact that the new code was running on my Core 2 Duo laptop and that the laptop was about 5x faster than the desktop, that's still a 100x improvement!

Result: QuickSort really is quick, even with very large arrays.

However, interesting results from perusing the 80MB of concordances generated were that the vocabulary of the book seems quite limited and there weren't as many outrageous words as I had thought.

There are about 15,000 words unique words, which number comes down to about 9,000 once the roots of the words had been identified so that "decay", "decays", "decayed", "decaying" etc. are considered as one item of vocabulary (I used Porter Stemming code I found somewhere and ported to VBA). So, maybe it won't be quite as linguistically challenging as I had feared... at least vocabularistically.

That's all for now - have to Do if it will be Done.

Marathon Stuff.

The Book

Yes, I am nearly at the end of the 2nd draft (which will be the first time the story has been complete, end-to-end) and we've just reached 280,510 words... only a few pages of the marked up 1st draft left to process but they are being pushed backwards by new narrative.

It's going quite nicely at the moment - thought I might have finished Draft #2 last week but the Q was "... and what sing will the fat lady sing?" to which, until recently, I hadn't the faintest idea. But now I do.

After that it will be a review of the (many but hopefully minor) issues I've noted en route and a complete re-read and then... well... we shall see.

So that's it really. You will find me at Castro Bistro, Madach Ter, Budapest from 11-18:00 local time, Mon-Fri (or, in local parlance Hetfotol-pentekig - plus a few accents that Eng. blogging doesn't support)

Long winded stuff (condensed)

One Large Cognac

is (14:11 local time) being enjoyed in celebration of another milestone... I have now written just over a quarter of a million words (250,025 to be precise). Working on the penultimate chapter, 40 pages from the end of the 423 page draft I printed out so long ago I can't remember when exactly, which printout was then marked up over the course of quite a long time and, at the beginning of September 2007 started to work my way through.

Back then, there were only 150,000 words... and that seemed a lot!

Seems it has taken me fourteen months to revise, interpolate and develop 90%, so - being unjustifiably precise about the whole thing - it should only take another two and half months to conclude the major revision... then only the final polish to do?

We shall see!

IT - the book - is getting there...

Tense Stuff

And the 240,000th word is....

Discuss

Scribble, scribble, scribble...

17th October, 230,000 words (admittedly we've slowed down... only 555 words per day since the last announcement).

Yesterday was a bit of a wipeout on account of Patch Tuesday's various Windows (in my case Vista HP) and other updates (Office etc.) being applied Wednesday night - leading to catastrophic failure of special goodies I've written to add functionality to Word to help me with navigating it...

To be specific, the ActiveX killbits patch not only prevents vulnerable ActiveX controls from being used by Internet Explorer it does so (via the "killbit") by stopping anything from running them... in my case MS Word - the Office XP Web Component I had on a userform simple wasn't there, which also meant the VBA code fell over "Cannot compile module" because the code referenced a now non-existent object.

However, lest you think it has been all work and no play (oh what fun to have to rebuild and restore one's work PC?) maybe I should share the news that traversable intra-universe wormhole mouths can not be charged! Took me a while to work it out (think: Gauss/divergence theorem + lack of horizon = lack of inside/outside distinction for a surface surrounding a wormhole mouth: think of the two types of circles that go around or though the hole in the middle of a torus/doughnut - they don't divide the surface)... but then I found confirmation in a footnote on p1200 of Misner, Thorne, Wheeler's Gravitation, which was nice. Still don't see how they can have mass either, I mean, come on...

Also worth mentioning, just in passing, something that occurred to me over a nice Lamb Madras at Indigo last night (a line of thought prompted by discussion of a recent New Scientist article on why the mind encourages superstition) which is that according to Your's Truly's theory of mind two contrasting styles of meditation (defocussing (e.g Zen ) vs. e.g. focussing (e.g. Tibetan though e.g. chanting)) lead to two different (but of course, the same) states of non-being, which we may summarise as:











If you know what I'm taking about, you know what I mean; if you know what I mean, why aren't you laughing?

We are in a jolly mood, aren't we?

Enlightening Stuff, eh?

Woah! IT

14th August 2008 - 200,000 words
24th September 2008 - 220,000 (the 220,000th was, by the way, "pleas")

33 writing days, 20,000 words = ~606 a day. Not bad.

Still haven't budged from the 86% of the way through the marked up copy - this is all new, extra, but important stuff... the current chapter (Arcturus) is already ~41,000 words (that's almost half an average paperback) on its own, so I suppose I (and eventually you) should be glad that they are not all that long, otherwise IT would be about half-a-million words and I'd probably be 2.5 years away from completion (that's working 11-6, Mon-Fri, every week... we don't do holidays when we're not earning) even if I could maintain the recent furious rate of scribbling - which I doubt I could.

Fortunately though the dénouement of this chapter is approaching... should be all done in another couple of weeks LOL!

Finally, for no reason other than the fact that my fingers are still on the keyboard here's a little bit more about IT, though I shall try to make it sound much duller than it really is ["A real page turner" (to quote my sister)]

It is, almost correctly speaking, an epic in prose poetry, intertwining narrative action, philosophy and mythology (world-spanning astronomical mythology and much, much, more!) in a timeless, placeless world. The questions are: what is it to be human, what is humanity, what are "human rights" (sort of), what is right, what is choice, the role of law, the administration of justice, social organisation, and probably quite a few other things I've already forgotten.

It's a journey - two journeys - traversing the ages of man, tales of love and tragedy, valour and cowardice, illusions and dreams, of seeking and finding and losing.... and so on.

The answers are... in there somewhere. I think. You may have to look for them.

It began a long time ago... soon it will be at and end.

IT. The Book. MY STUFF

OMG!

Sometime in the last five, ten, fifteen minutes I guess, "IT" passed the 200,000 word mark.

That's two hundred thousand words.

Two hundred thousand.

Two Hundred Thousand!

OMG!!

(don't worry, I'll get over it shortly - and no, the 200,000 isn't made up of 66,666 repetitions of "Oh My God!")

The Book - Big, Beautiful, Wordy Stuff!

Privacy

I said I would try to work out why privacy is important, so here's a brief answer. It's overly simplistically expressed but this is a blog, not "An Essay Concerning..."

The distinctive quality of sentience is the capacity for choice; to interfere with another's choice, where that choice affects none but the individual concerned is, in general, wrong. "Privacy", being shorthand for the freedom of the individual to choose what information about themselves is known to others, is important and must be defended because what we choose to tell reflects and shapes our relationships to others and affects our vulnerability to exploitation by others.

Failure to respect another's privacy is therefore wrong insofar as it takes away this freedom to choose.

You'll find it spelled out in more detail in "IT"... eventually.

Ethical Stuff. Political Stuff.

A Grammatical Conundrum

Not the first, but I'm dealing with them one at a time - hence the absence of the word "conundra" in the title.

So...

"they would then have kept with you until such time as there were cause for you to be confined or, for want of proper cause, an escort were unwarranted"

"they would have" - past, conditional... "until" and then, er, the past subjunctive of "be" to convey the (unreal past) but future looking implied secondary condition?

Is that right, or is there a better way?

I would that English were simpler sometimes!

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

Shall I Give Thee An Order-of-Magnitude Estimation?

IT - the book.

What's it like to write IT?

It's like trying to write 4 or more sonnets a day - day in, day out, week in, week out, etcetera etcetera etcetera. [the additional complications of inter and intra-sonnet connectivity - I wonder whether anyone else has ever spoken of "intra-sonnet connectivity"? - wholistic integrity, etc. etc. etc. we shall temporarily ignore...]

Compared to which, writing a sonnet would be easy.

As would writing just a book.

But as someone once said "If a thing's worth doing, it's worth doing badly."

We can but try.

Not Pat Garret but Chilly (a bit)

Just so you know, when I looked at the temperature gadget this morning (at what was not by any means an ungodly hour - 8:30 ish I suppose) it was -6C here in Budapest. That's quite cold - though possibly not quite as cold as the bus stop at Luton Airport in November.

Now it's only -1C, but though I may not be huddled over a candle in a creaky attic, struggling to hold the quill in my benumbed fingers in order to scratch out whatever words of wisdom the Muses may confide, it's not all wine and roses...

OK, there is mulled wine available now that winter's here but, allow me to list for you some of the trials and tribulations I must overcome each day.

Firstly, it gets a tad nippy here in the corner (see pic for precise location within Castro Bisztro). Apparently the wall behind me is a plasterboarded window and it can get a bit draughty through the hole they cut to the electrical socket, though whether its a mere sough or howling arctic gale does depend a bit on the wind direction it seems.

The whole temperature situation is exacerbated by the fact that the place is - as is common here - centrally heated, but not in the English sense of "central" to one's own place, central to the whole building... so it turns off when everyone goes to work, i.e. when I get to work.

And yesterday, someone must have mistaken Oil of Cloves for some couture perfume or aftershave and then over-egged the pudding. Ye gods! It made my eyes water. [Actually, now I think about it, it could have been the foralt bor (mulled wine) coming to the boil... whatever it was it was mighty powerful.]

And I have to periodically reset the cable modem and linux system that runs Castro's wifi . Yes Linux may be very attractive and easy to understand if you have the personality of Linoleum with Asperger's but trying to work out what it's up to actually makes me appreciate Windows. Sometimes I just sit in front of the screen, rocking and banging my head on the keyboard - but to be fair Windows has that effect too sometimes.

And my coffee gets too cold too quickly.

But, I keep at IT... it wouldn't be art without a bit of suffering, would it?

Always Scribble, Scribble, Scribble, eh?

Maybe I could ask for another lump of coal?

David Icke Needs Your Help

Yes he does! Just wandering the web for weirdness I thought I'd go to the horse's mouth, where I find to my horror...

UPDATED MAY 2007

CLICK HERE

This is real serious and David's work is in imminent danger of ceasing without your help. Donate system now working.

What next? Is he in danger of going the same was as wossisname - Mr Veritarse? Oh deary me.

By the way... that link should work, and when you have read or heard what Mr Icke has to say I am sure you will agree that he does indeed need all the help he can get.

[Obviously this is not a great writing day... I have a problem with the word 'chimneys' at the moment - call it a touch of the flue if you will...]

Update on IT

About 1/3rd of the way through the mark-up, and out of idle curiosity decided to to a word-count: 150,082 words.

I started making the corrections etc around 4th September (about 7 weeks ago, but ~2 weeks lost to travel, dentistry, visits from friends etc., so let's say 5 weeks work) when the word count must have been around 146,000...

Whoa! That means by the time I've finished the mark-up it will probably have grown to ~160,000 words - and that's before I put in the two missing episodes, put back in the right place a (small) chunk I took out recently and rewrite the one remaining absolutely awful chunk... oops! We could be heading for a novel of ~180,000+

Good news for insomniacs.

Sziget 2007 - Day 2 - Haka, Kaizers Orchestra and The Chemical Brothers

On the second day I fulfilled an ambition: I finally got the chance to do the Haka today thanks to Te Matarae I Orehu Maori Dance Group and Wetini Mitai-Ngatai, their leader - choreographer who has been helping to preserve Maori tradition and garnered considerable respect for his efforts - and deservedly so.

I've been to New Zealand numerous times (though not since 2000, now I think about it)- beautiful place, fantastic people. The first few trips were business trips (Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch) but the rest were pure pleasure - though it was on the very first trip that I took a week off to drive back across North Island - stopping off at Rotorua, Mt Ruapehu, and so on along the way for thermal parks, spas and a spot of skiing.

Since then my interest in Maori tradition developed in the course of researching IT; I have a wonderful book called The Astronomical Knowledge of the Maori by Elsdon Best in which the traditional knowledge of the "Whanau Marama" - "the children of light" (i.e. the heavenly bodies) was recorded at the beginning of the 20th century; sadly, even then much of the oral traditional knowledge was already lost.

As a tiny illustration of how central astronomical lore was to the Maori (due in no small part to its importance in navigation) consider this lullaby (Best, p5)

I haere mai koe i te ao o Puanga
I te Huihui o Matariki
I a Parearua, i a Poutu-te-rangi
Ka mutu, e tama, nga whetu homai kai ki Aotea

Translation: You come hither from the realm of Rigel, from the Assembly of the Pleiades, from Jupiter and from Poutu-te-rangi [Altair: Best p33]. These alone, O child, are the stars which provide food at Aotea [Great Barrier Island - see wikipedia]

Outside New Zealand, Haka, meaning "words of fire" or "fiery words" (Ha - breath, hence speech, words; ka - fiery), is probably best known by the intimidatory performance of a war haka by the All Blacks rugby team before the start of a game.

According to Wetini Mitai-Ngatai, the whole purpose of the eye rolling, tongue poking and face pulling is to make oneself appear as mad/hungry/fierce as possible - and thus "the uglier the better", so he was naturally very complimentary about my efforts.

What we leant was the Ka Mate haka - Wetini Mitai-Ngatai taught us the movements, the words and the story a piece at a time and so in the course of about half an hour we put it all together and finally performed the whole thing with members of Te Matarae I Orehu Maori Dance Group mingled among the great unwashed who make Sziget what it is. It was a fantastic 45 minutes.

So, after working up a bit of a sweat and getting the adrenalin flowing (we did some Maori martial arts practice games too) it was time to get on with the rest of the day...

Today's unexpected find was the Norwegian rock band Kaizers Orchestra on the main stage (direct links to MySpace, Wikipedia, YouTube). They opened the show on the nagyszinpad but should have headlined on some other day instead in my opinion - they easily outclassed some of the other supposed top-draw artists.

Of course, by the time The Chemical Brothers were due on stage at 21:30 the space in front of the main stage was completely full - by which I mean completely full, and considering that it's a space of at least 40,000 square meters the crowd seemed easily 50,000 strong (it looked huge, but the whole capacity of the island is only 70,000 and they definitely weren't all there - just most of them).

Unfortunately, there had been a few of what the BBC had anticipated as "light showers" but which turned out to be short but torrential downpours during the day - necessitating periodic retreat to whatever tented beer pavilion was closest... bummer!) - so whilst not quite up to Glastonbury standards, the ground underfoot was a bit damp and squelchy in places by now. This meant rivers of people skirting large puddles on the way in and trying to keep to the metal sheet areas once they got there (or at least avoiding the major pools).

Excellent show of course. What else can I say?

We caught some Lead Zeppelin on the Blues Stage later - the lead singer looked a bit like a gay Dom Deluise but he had a pretty good Jimmy Page substitute voice.

We probably went to the Roma tent for some gypsy music, but I'm damned if I can tell you who we might have heard.

And it was good.