I've given myself until the end of the month to get my movie-review manuscript together; that's assuming a July deadline for self-publishing the book in both dead-tree and e-book forms. I'm going slowly, though; this manuscript is a monster. I'm looking at old movie reviews and tweaking the wording, here and there, because I see cleverer ways of saying what I'd originally said. And yeah, I'm finding the occasional boneheaded mistake. Along with that, I'm reformatting everything from page size (for the PDF/dead-tree version, I'm converting from A4 to A5 like last time) to how I usually render movie titles (I normally put movie titles in quotes on this blog because there is, in fact, a journalistic precedent for doing so, but if I'm to be more literary in my book, I have to change those quoted titles to italicized titles). It's a lot of work, done over and over again, for literally hundreds upon hundreds of reviews. I can see this project stretching far beyond July into October and beyond. And I haven't done a final page count yet, but I can see my book bloating to 2,000 pages. If so, that's going to be a problem. There are ways to get the page count down without affecting content: font type, font size, line spacing, and kerning (space between letters in a word) are the most obvious methods there. But I may still end up having to chop out some reviews in the interest of space, and this requires being harsh with myself and asking, "Do I really need this review to be in the book?" If the answer isn't a definite yes, I should probably cut the review out, but as anyone editing their own work can tell you, it's always hard to mutilate your baby.
Expect more updates as I deal with this multitude of issues.
ADDENDUM: I mathed out an approximate page count (number of reviews times avg. number of printed A5 pages per review), and it comes to almost exactly 1,500 pages, which sits on the borderline of "Do I need to cut stuff out of my ms?" I might get away with making a 1,500-page book. Hefty but doable. I have bigger books on my shelves.
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