UPDATE on my book on Del Rey Books

Well, I don't know how you write your books, but when I write books apparently, I seem to go more than a little overboard.

So, as many of you probably realize, I've been researching Judy-Lynn and Lester del Rey, the founders of Del Rey Books and the modern fantasy genre, and it's been several years in the works. This monography is one-half literary biography(s), one-half institutional history, and another one-half argument about how our interpretations of literary texts is based on institutional factors -- i.e., the publishing industry -- that most critics don't know anything about.

Working title is The Dark Lords of Speculative Fiction: Del Rey Books and the Making of a Genre Empire.

Some of my blog entries for this include:

But anyhoo, after spending the last six weeks organizing my copious notes, I've finally printed them out .... 133,00 words across about 140 pages, which, if you're awesome at doing math, means I like to cram a lot of text in tiny fonts into my pages.

And those are just the notes I've printed out.

I also have another 200,000 words (approximately) of annotated articles, publishing history, archival research, personal interviews and what not. Granted, much of that is what's I organized into the original 133,000 printed-out words, so there's a fair bit of duplicated text.

And that doesn't even include the 4,528-entry hand-curated data set I created on every SFF novel published between 1972 and 1991.

All of which means that I got a heck of a lot of outlining (and then writing) in front of me.


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