Friday, September 28, 2007

8000 words in...

So I'm about 8000 words into this new firearms mythbusting post, and I'm not happy.

The piece is at that stage of long where you start thinking, oy this is too long. The problem is, even the merest skim on the subject is several thousand words long so you might as well hit the high (and low) points.

So I'm right at the point where I think there is just enough information there to be useful and informative, at least a survey level of comprehensiveness (is that even a word? My spellcheck says it is, but I swear it shouldn't be).

Unfortunately it's also at the point where the experts on the subject who read this page (and I know theres more than a couple who do), are probably going to be irritated by the stuff I left out or skimmed. Of course if I put everything necessary into it, it would be 20,000 words long at the least (which is a bout 1/3 to 1/4 the way through a typical non fiction book).

Plus theres the joys of blog reading patterns, and feed readers. I was planning on publishing it this morning, and now it's Friday afternoon, and most people have stopped reading blogs for the weekend. If I post it tonight, a lot of people won't bother checking until Monday morning, and by then it may have fallen out of their current feed.

As of right now, I've probably got about 8 hours of actual writing time and effort into it; a bit more than my usual long posts, because I've been doing a lot of on the fly revising; and honestly at this point I really want to finish the damn thing.

Ahhh screw it, I'm just going to keep writing it until it's done; however long that may be; and I'll post it right then. I write this stuff to amuse me, and relieve my stress, not worry about how other people read.