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I have added a new category, Books and Manuscripts.

Last winter I downloaded a Linux e-book reader program, can't recall the name at the moment. In the accompanying documentation was a reference to Smash Words e-book publishing website, which caters to independent authors who want to publish their works in the new electronic formats.

Those of you who know me personally, know that I have written two novels, but has been unable to publish them for a number of real life reasons.

The program offered at Smash Words is very tempting and it is free, and it has fired my imagination to dust off a manuscript I wrote 20 years ago to see if I can get it ready to publish as an e-book.

So a few weeks later, I have determined that the manuscript can be converted, but problems exist.

For one thing, the great bulk of the original manuscript was written on a Commodore 64. I had to use my late brother's telephone line at night to transmit the data to my sisters telephone since Commodore and PC formatted data at the time could not be merged. After that I bought my first PC (ATT 286) and a Word processor, Word Writer for DOS and began to work on getting it formatted for the PC.

Somewhere between then (1995) and now I stopped editing the work managing only to print out a single hard copy. Much of the original manuscript is preserved, about 90 percent, and the parts that weren't preserved was preserved in hard copy. So I have a complete manuscript.

But this manuscript is currently at 420 pages, and that is only half the manuscript.I still have another 500 pages to edit still before I can really start to trim it out.

But the story is so large I may well split it up into two volumes. Dunno how that will sell, but I will keep my readers posted.

As usual I plan to continue writing for Rantburg and Borderland Beat to try to build an audience before the manuscript gets published. I have already bought a website with the name of the manuscript which will go live just before I publish.


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