The Plotters

My printers have just sent me a pile of 24 'plotters', little booklets that show me how the actual book will look like. This is the very last chance to make any changes.

All very exciting... and just a little worrying.

Anyway, I decided I'd better read them through just in case, and I still managed to find some typos. Arrraugh!

So I did a sum just to console myself.

QandH is 105000 words long, or about 586000 characters. Suppose there are 5 typos lurking in it still. That would mean the text is 99.999% correct! But it's still not good enough, to my mind. I want perfection. Trouble is, each error becomes exponentially harder to spot.

Esther's certain I'm developing late onset OCD.

Making a podcast

I've had great fun the last few weeks trying to make a half-decent podcast of Quid and Harmony. Finding a place in the house that was quiet enough was the first challenge. Even building a cubby out of mattresses was less than effective, though it did bring back all sorts of childhood memories.

Anyway, a great bit of software called Audacity has a noise-reduction feature, and that solved most of the problem. It removes most background at the cost of a bit of distortion. Well worth doing.

Sound files are pretty big. QandH is about 12 hours of reading, and the raw wav files came to nearly 11 Gig. My poor hard-drive nearly died from shock.

Anyway, the edited mp3 equivalent came to about 600MB and is quite good quality, even if I say so myself.

A bit more tinkering, and she'll be ready to roll. I'll put a sample on my website. Soon, if the wind blows true, you'll be able to download the whole thing from podiobooks.com. Or you'll be able to buy the CD from me.