I'm making one last pass through the book in pdf form to make sure it's in order, but overall it seems to be. 490 page -- about 450 of them the actual novel; the rest are title pages and a sample of The Lyons' Den at the end, to be goofy. What's fun is, it's the same number of pages as the previous one. It had to be to work with the cover.
It certainly looks better than it did, especially the page headers. I had one hell of a time getting them to work well enough in the previous version...and they never did look completely right...but now it's nice and neat, with the page numbers at the bottom of the page. Helps to know what you're doing, even if you don't know all the tricks on how to control Word's quirks.
It's a long book and pretty tough to read, at times, but I did some writing in it I'm proud of...like when Eric's sitting on a front porch in a house near Dallas, sipping icy lemonade on a warm summer night with Samuel, a man who went through the same thing as him years ago at the hands of the same man...and who's reading Allen's version of what happened --
I let my mind drift...wander through the night, through air that still pressed against you like a blanket, both warming and cooling at the same time. I listened to sleepy brush critters mingle their chittering with bleating frogs in the brush and owls calling in the trees. I caught a whiff of honeysuckle on a soft breeze, sweet and thick with bloom. It added to the tang of the lemonade. I thought about nothing.
I grew so still, I could hear the blood swishing through my veins, slow and rhythmic, almost like it was scraping the walls of my vessels. I could feel the bones and tendons move in my elbow as I raised my glass, drawing against each other in vague protest. It was like I’d stepped out of my body to take inventory of every sensation I could think of and thought it was some brilliant achievement. I could easily have drifted off into the night, leaving behind all coherent thought and pain, but then I noticed Samuel had stopped reading.
I looked at him...and in the shadows and soft porch light I lost the soft creases and lines that hinted at age taking hold of his face, lost the loosening feel of his cheeks, lost the hint of a second chin, saw him probably as he looked twenty years ago — young, innocent and almost beautiful, seeming more like a brother of mine than Bobby could ever have. In a cold moment of clarity, I understood why Allen would choose him to further his story; he was the bastard’s ideal.
He finally looked at me and shook his head. “Man...that Allen is really somethin’.” I let him take his time to continue. “This thing he wrote...that’s not me.”
It certainly looks better than it did, especially the page headers. I had one hell of a time getting them to work well enough in the previous version...and they never did look completely right...but now it's nice and neat, with the page numbers at the bottom of the page. Helps to know what you're doing, even if you don't know all the tricks on how to control Word's quirks.
It's a long book and pretty tough to read, at times, but I did some writing in it I'm proud of...like when Eric's sitting on a front porch in a house near Dallas, sipping icy lemonade on a warm summer night with Samuel, a man who went through the same thing as him years ago at the hands of the same man...and who's reading Allen's version of what happened --
I grew so still, I could hear the blood swishing through my veins, slow and rhythmic, almost like it was scraping the walls of my vessels. I could feel the bones and tendons move in my elbow as I raised my glass, drawing against each other in vague protest. It was like I’d stepped out of my body to take inventory of every sensation I could think of and thought it was some brilliant achievement. I could easily have drifted off into the night, leaving behind all coherent thought and pain, but then I noticed Samuel had stopped reading.
I looked at him...and in the shadows and soft porch light I lost the soft creases and lines that hinted at age taking hold of his face, lost the loosening feel of his cheeks, lost the hint of a second chin, saw him probably as he looked twenty years ago — young, innocent and almost beautiful, seeming more like a brother of mine than Bobby could ever have. In a cold moment of clarity, I understood why Allen would choose him to further his story; he was the bastard’s ideal.
He finally looked at me and shook his head. “Man...that Allen is really somethin’.” I let him take his time to continue. “This thing he wrote...that’s not me.”
I'm glad I'm doing this, ro remind myself sometimes I do okay...
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