How on earth do we do this from a technical point of view?

This is a blog. Do we blog the whole story? How hard would that be to read.

Besides, we want to talk about more than the novel itself, we want to talk about the process of writing the novel and how each of us contributes to this.

Choice of manuscript

No-one really wants to read a first draft. They’re raw, poorly written and the story usually jumps all over the place. They have holes so big you disappear into them.

Our first drafts do, anyway.

They take months to write.

Who wants to sit through months of a bad story? Very few people, particularly when you have to re-read that story again and again.

So while in an ideal world you would take this process right from the beginning, it’s just not practical to do so.

This leaves us with one story we can use—Caid of Barrain. Barrain is a fantasy novel that crosses two worlds—our own world, and Barrain, a more traditional fantasy setting with  less technology and less people. Barrain has already been through two drafts. The second is actually a script, unusual for us, but hey, that’s writing. It’s on its third re-write.

Manuscipts

A typical manuscript we write gets printed out, scribbled on, the pages rearranged. How do we show that on the blog?

Not only that, our first draft is so old we have the printout, along with the files backed up on disk, but the new computer doesn’t read these backups (Iomega zip drives, great for their time, but well supersed by the flash drives we use to back-up now). We would need to reinstall the Iomege drive—if we could—just to print a copy of the novel. We would probably find our latest version of Word couldn’t even read the files. Nothing for it, but to use the paper copy.

That means scanning it in and converting it to something everyone can read. A PDF file.

Have you ever tried to scan and convert 400+ pages to a PDF? Easy enough to scan if you have a document feeder on your printer, but take a look at the size of the file that is produced. It’s got to be loadable as well. We had to manually convert each page to two colours, so that the chapters came out to a size that could be handled.

This is taking most of our time at present, just getting draft 1 on-line.

Isn’t technology marvellous. When it works, it works beautifully, but when you have to do things manually, it can take a long time.  

Given that draft 1 is a PDF, draft 2 may as well be a PDF as well. That’s easy enough to do. It’s a straight print to PDF. We use PDF 995 to print, mostly because there’s a free version.

We haven’t thought about draft 3 yet. May stick to the PDFs, may choose to load it as HTML. We’ll see how it goes.

Copyright 

What about copyright issues? The internet is a public place, plagiarism is rife. Is someone going to steal our story?

That one we’ll have to take on trust, copyright the page, document and date everything we do and believe that its being so public is a protection in itself.

Oh, and we’ll also register the screenplay (second draft) with the Australian Writers Guild, just to prove it really is ours.

Targets

We’re both pretty busy right now, so we’re not going to set word or page counts. (One page, Times Roman, runs to roughly 250 words). we’ll try instead to post something every week, but that’s about as much as we’ll commit to.

Size of the novel? Can’t really tell until it’s complete. The first draft ran to 80,000 words. Going on past experience that means the finished story will probably run to half as much again.