Today I am printing out my 2003 nano masterpiece* Finally, after many trials and tribulations (which included installing a whole new version of Word - which I despise, more on that later - troubleshooting my printer, and then picking up paper from across the room. Printer doesn't like troubleshooting, apparently), I am printing! Hooray!
How many pages it works out to blows my mind. I know it's short compared to, say, Stephen King, or Jennifer Crusie,or any other author at all, but it is the single longest piece of anything I have ever written. So far it is just under 60K words, I expect it will get longer by at least a third by the time I am finished. But, just to take stock of where I am at the moment, I decided to print the whole thing out so I could read it in one big stack instead of 40 different files. At first I was going to use standard manuscript formatting (details found here.) - but that was waaaaaay too much paper. I struck a compromise after running the following comparisons in Word.
Courier 12pt double spaced with 1" margins all around = 291 pages
Courier 12pt 1.5 spaced with 1" margins = 217 pgs
Courier 10pt double spaced with 1"' margins = 211 pgs
Courier 10pt 1.5 spaced with 1" margins = 157 pgs
I ended up going the 157 page route, which I think will be just fine for readabliity. I might even get it all printed out some time this century too, now that I have disciplined the printer. Yay!
* the words nano and masterpiece are usually said together with some irony. I do not claim that it is particularly brilliant, but I do claim that I did it - and I am proud of the accomplishment, no matter how humble. Even if you take away the thinking up the story part - that's a LOT of typing!!!
How many pages it works out to blows my mind. I know it's short compared to, say, Stephen King, or Jennifer Crusie,or any other author at all, but it is the single longest piece of anything I have ever written. So far it is just under 60K words, I expect it will get longer by at least a third by the time I am finished. But, just to take stock of where I am at the moment, I decided to print the whole thing out so I could read it in one big stack instead of 40 different files. At first I was going to use standard manuscript formatting (details found here.) - but that was waaaaaay too much paper. I struck a compromise after running the following comparisons in Word.
Courier 12pt double spaced with 1" margins all around = 291 pages
Courier 12pt 1.5 spaced with 1" margins = 217 pgs
Courier 10pt double spaced with 1"' margins = 211 pgs
Courier 10pt 1.5 spaced with 1" margins = 157 pgs
I ended up going the 157 page route, which I think will be just fine for readabliity. I might even get it all printed out some time this century too, now that I have disciplined the printer. Yay!
* the words nano and masterpiece are usually said together with some irony. I do not claim that it is particularly brilliant, but I do claim that I did it - and I am proud of the accomplishment, no matter how humble. Even if you take away the thinking up the story part - that's a LOT of typing!!!
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