Dirk Maggs Book Part 18

Did I tell you that I am now into the final edit of the draft, but I have some tables that need to be redone in a better way so that they take up less space? Well, the snag I have is that its hard work and such and such and well I have stopped doing the edit, the other reason being that I have a great read on at the moment by Alastair Reynolds called The Perfect and well I want to find out whats going to happen, really its that good, I think so.

Dirk Maggs Book Part 17

The edit on the 1st draft is going well I think. The draft without any index is 327 A4 pages long. As the edit goes it should drop down as I have some tables that need to be altered so that they go across the page and not down the page, some of the are quite long, so I am hoping that when edited as I said above that the page space being used will go down, so that will also mean the page count will also go down. When I do whatever I am going to do with the index or indexes then the page count will then go up, by how much I just don't know at this stage.

Dirk Maggs Book Part 16

Yes

I have done some work on the book at last. In fact I have started to edit the final draft an have got to page 40 so far.

Index oh Index

As I have said before else where in this blog the first draft of the Dirk Maggs book is now done, I was going to start doing the index or indexes when I remember something I had read which said that it is always a good idea to put your first draft away and go and do something else, so that when you look at it again there is some time and distance between you and the draft and you will look at it if a different light and frame of mind.

So I am going to take that advice, which mean I can put off having to do the Index just for a few more weeks, to say that I am relived would be an under statement. So this means I can get on with my other projects, like updating the Dirk Maggs website and stuff like that.

Dirk Maggs Book Part 14

1st draft complete page count is now 329. First go at doing an index ended up with word crashing and loosing all the work I had done on marking up the index, not as bad as it sounds as I had only marked up 4 pages. I was using the mark all feature in word when it crashed.

Not sure if I ran out of memory in the machine I was using or what.

Dirk Maggs Book Part 13

There has been some progress all the drafts of all the chapters has now been done. I have now started to create the master document witll all the chapters in.

This is the second time that I have done this as the first time word inported all the files in the wrong order!

It would appear that in A4 page size the book is 357 pages long with out how many indexes I end up with.

Appendix Index

As the 1st draft of the Dirk Maggs book is now very close to being done, I have had a strange thought that I have so far failed to find an answer to. The question or thought was this can you have an index to an appendix, or is an appendix in a book a mutated form of index?


I think its a good question, the only snag with such a great question is that finding an answer to it is well hard in fact very hard and at this time I have not yet found an answer.

At this stage the book has a chapter for each years work a chapter on other audio work and then 2 very large appendixes, now I do know because I have seen them that you can have loads of appendix in a book I think I once counted something like 10 in one book that I picked up years ago.

The thing is do I need to have an index for each section of the book? e.g one index for the work done in years another index for each appendix and an index for the other audio work?

Or do I go down the route of having an index for subjects e.g one for the radio shows and another for the actors or people in the productions?

I also have to keep in mind that I will have to do another edition of this book in a few years time as the idea is that it forms a written record of the website at the time the book was written.

At this time I do not have any answers to the above questions

Dirk Maggs Book Part 11

News on the Dirk Maggs book is that the 1st draft of all work in years 1988 to 2009 has been done.

The 1st draft of the 1st appendix has also been done.

The 1st draft of any other audio work has also been done.

At this rate the 1st draft of the book should be done by June 2008

Making publication due October 2008 at the rate this is all going

Index

Yes I know, I have now done so may blogs on this subject, but I am having trouble finding a good info source which could guide me on which way to go with how many indexes I need. I just supose I will have to keep on looking.

The good news is that I will not need it for a while.

Open Office

As a follow up to yesterday and the troubles with converting a file on LULU so that it was in a print format Pdf, good idea no1 was to use another ep programme.

The idea was to load the file in Open office wp and the resave the file, good idea? well that did not happen all the versions I have of Open Office(version 2.0) opened the file no problem and then stopped working when i asked it to resave the file. No in Open Office's defence I have to admit i was using it as a portable app so maybe some thing with that set up is what is causing the problem.

So other news is that I have not done any more drafts work on the Dirk Maggs book it is still stalled.

On the index fron (eg who many and what type) no progress.

Perhaps progress next time I report in this blog.

Plans that go wrong

So I had this great plan, I would convert an exsisting manuscript to 8.5*11 so that it the right size to be printed in hardback.

Step one, the converting was in the end okay as it only took a few hours and it looked good at the end of it all.

Step two, now thats when things started to go off the rails in a real big way. The upload to LULU was okay and that worked. The next step converting the document into a printable PDF did not go right, in fact it failed. Now the big problem is that I don't know why the conversion failed as LULU don't say why the document failed, they just say that it failed, yeh I know so useful.

So I am at a loss what to do...

I think I shall have another look at the Dirk Maggs book the drafts that I have done so far....

I last thjought I did have was to try a differant wp programme to se if that is the problem. I normally use word 2003 nice and old and it mostly works and so should be without any major problems.

Dirk Maggs Book Part 10

Things have gone a bit slow on the draft front, mainly as I have been looking at hardback or paperback and also the problem of indexes, the index problem is one that I have yet to fully work out which way to go. If I go for more than one index then the work in doing such a thing is a lot, the rewards of having a good index can not be under estimated that much I am sure of. The only question is how many and what type of indexes do I want or does the book need?

On the hardback front I have decided that hardback is the way to go, the only problem now is what size of hardback?

At this time I do not have an answer to that question yet, if I have too small a book in page size the number of pages will go up and the other problem, which I have not yet looked at is how the content on each page will be effected. With the first problem as far as I can see as the page count goes up so does the cost of the final book.

A wild thought that I did have was, well why not have each years work as a volume in it's own right? but a quick look at this idea has already told me that if I stay in A4 size pages then some of the volumes will be very thin on the otherhand if the page size is smaller than A4 then the page count goes up, so all in all at this time I do not know what to to muli volume or one large volume.

I suppose the answer will only become clear once I have done all the drafts and put the book together in its first draft layout.

Dirk Maggs Book Part 7

Some progress of sorts in that I have done one of the chapters that is not work done in a year and is not an appendix.

Yes I have done the draft chapter for all other Audio work that Dirk has done, it was a bit of a surprise just how much in the early 2000's he did, he does not appear to have done much since the late 2006's.

So when I get the chance, I will list here each chapter and just how many pages in draft form in A4 pages the chapters take up.

Yes I know that it will all change as each chapter gets edited, but I want to keep a record, just to see if it is true that each rewrite is edit edit edit and that the number of words goes down.

Dirk Maggs Book Part 6

This is how the book looks in draft form at this time, each year will be a chapter in the completed book.

These are the Drafted chapters so far;

1988
1989
1990
2005
2006
2007
2008
2009

As you can still see there is a long way to go, I am not sure if I will get it done by my deadline of xmas 2008.

Dirk Maggs Book Part 4

I re looked at all the drafts that I have so far done, and I don't think I have missed anything out, that I don't know of. The next few weeks in real life are going to be busy so I know that I will not have the time to work on the next draft chapter.

The plan is still for the book to be done and printed by Dec 2008, as the book is going to be a private printing, the only way that you will se a copy is if you know me or you are Dirk Maggs.

Maggs Book Part 3

Update time

The news is that there has not been any more work done on the book. This due to real life getting in the way and me not having the time to get my head around the next chapter that has to be done in draft format first.

Maybe in the next few weeks there will be time.