LAST EDITED ON Jul-25-14 AT 02:10 AM (EDT)
 
>>Word count: 80,058
>Yow! That came together fast. It's been, what, 3 weeks? (first post on
>the forum seems to be July 6th, dunno how long it was cooking before
>that).

Oh, we were some way along before we felt confident enough to start promoting. Still, it has been coming together pretty quickly in the last month-plus; we've been mostly head-down on CTCS since An Avatar in New Avalon dropped - which is why you haven't seen S5DS05 or The Great Ziggurat Zeppelin Raid, and probably won't for a while longer, despite the fact that both are also fairly well along.

If I had to guess, and I do, that guess would be that one or both of those will still come out before CTCS, simply because there's so much less (for which read: essentially no) post-production to be done on either one, whereas CTCS is going to require a ton (plus the art may not all be finished before the text is). That is, however, only 2 AM speculation under the influence of my MS medication's Flu-Like Side Effects, so don't hold me to it too rigidly.

>>** Note that this is a Microsoft Word 97-2003 .doc file, so a lot of
>>that - I estimate about 1/3 - is word processor overhead, not the
>>actual content.
>Only 1/3? Granted, this might be the conversion factor, but just I
>watched a 135kb .odt file turn into a 1.8mb .doc file.

How much overhead Word adds depends a lot on how much formatting there is, but the inflation factor involved with the CTCS draft is nowhere near that big. The last time I explicitly checked it, I saved to plain text at around 500K .doc size and ended up with a 300K .txt file, so it was around 40% at the time. It would really balloon if I were embedding the illustrations in the draft file, but we're going to do that in post, so the file size is still a reasonable thumbnail representation.

I'm more used to dealing in file sizes than word counts - all those years working exclusively in plain text, with text editors that don't volunteer the latter information unprovoked - but I'm given to understand that the lower bound for consideration as a "novel" in e.g. the Hugo awards* is 40,000 words, so CTCS is a respectable length, and there's still a considerable way to go. When complete, it'll almost certainly be the longest single document in EPU history (unseating Neon Exodus Evangelion: Apotheosis Now).

I wouldn't normally big that up ahead of time - it's not my habit to give progress reports - but this is such an unusual project in so many other respects, I figured what the hell. Might as well talk about the process a little.

--G.
* Not that I am claiming eligibility for the Hugo in any but a purely quantitative way. :)
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.