Last night I worked on my ‘Writings Collection’, sizing it up and exploring a way of indexing it. With regard to size I counted 33 notebooks or cahiers and 14 - small but interesting - note pads.. For the indexing I selected four cahiers for which I first made up a pencilled spread sheet with trial headings.
I labelled the four entries A, B, C and D and recorded their recording dates, appearance, content aspects and their word count in the ‘notes’ column. The content of these four consists of diary, writings, and many entries relating to my take on world view and the human situation. Book D is called a Non-Diary and deals solely with my worldview.
Using this value and the grand total of 47 books and pads, we get an upper bound of one million words. A lower bound I calculated using 15k words times 33 cahiers, giving half a million words.
These four books contain about 85k - thousand - words together, which makes an average of 21k words. Using this value and the grand total of 47 books and pads, we get an upper bound of one million words. A lower bound I calculated using 15k words times 33 cahiers, giving half a million words. So, somewhere in between these bounds will be the actual count, which we may never know exactly!
How does this compare to a published book? I counted just the text pages of Ronald Wright’s “Time among the Maya”, which gave me 8*36*360 words or 103,680 in total. Would I get five books from my all my writing? Not really, because there is much overlap and repetition in them, so one book would seem reasonable. Shorter is better than longer, but it should be complete.
So far the sizing up, but what about the spreadsheet trial? Well it took me 20 minutes to set up the pencilled sheet and enter the info for the four selected cahiers. I then proceeded to set up a computer - Excel - sheet. To enter the same data in it took about 25 minutes. This makes ten minutes per cahier to collect and enter its data.
The total of 47 books and pads then would require 470 minutes or about eight (8) hours of non-stop work. Working on this about one hour per day and five a week, it would take me two weeks to complete that index. This seems quite possible and will certainly be worth it. My only concern is the completeness of content column information. It will have to remain general, but can always be supplemented with a reference note when that is useful.
Later at night, I posted two daily entries and printed my rudimentary trial spread sheet from the Asus-tablet for which I first had to download my printer’s driver. But, I did get it to work and that makes me feel pleased and accomplished.
After the news I read in the ‘D’ book, the Red and Gold Peter Pauper Press Journal as it is called in full! My writings in it are fully dedicated to my ‘worldview’, but has only forty six (46) pages and stops at a point where I begin to address the chapter ‘Personal’ on the eight intended ones. This ‘Golden Non-Diary Journal’ seems to contain the key and I intuit that I should start the reading of my writings at this place.
Later on Herman and I will meet for lunch and we’ll have lots to discuss, such as last Monday’s Federal election results, the Quimby course, to be supplemented with our daily activities and interests! A long lunch in the offing! And, I also need to stop by at DJ’s for some produce and fruit.
<9:37am~