Rumored to Exist A novel by Jon Konrath Facts and Figures

Some statistics on the book:

• Inception: Late november 1995
• First Draft: 4/23/1996
• Last Major draft started: 7/5/2001
• Number of major drafts: 7
• First added to RCS: 7/26/1998
• Number of RCS checkins: 54
• Final draft complete: 6/11/2002
• Total writing time: about 6 years, 8 months
• Biggest major revision: 6/18/1999-6/29/1999 when I took everything I wrote in Seattle, set it aside, picked out only the pieces I liked, and called that the "New York" draft.
• Dumbest major revision: Either around 6/30/1999 when I started adding annotations to everything and gave up two days later, or 8/3/1998 when I tried to add a bizarre time-travel thread to the whole book, and later removed it and vowed to eventually rewrite it as another book.
• Final word count: 89699
• Number of passive sentences: 2%
• Reading level: 9th grade (according to MS Word)
• Number of times I used the word 'fuck': 480
• Number of times I used the word 'love': 35
• Number of times I used the word 'kill': 122
• The book was started on a business trip in Boston. The bulk of the writing took place in Seattle (1995-1999), and New York (1999-2002), but pieces of writing and editing took place all over the country, including Las Vegas; Washington, DC; Toronto; Pittsburgh; Treasure Island, Florida; Bloomington, IN; San Diego, CA; and many points and airports in between.

About the Cover - The cover photo is a view looking west at the intersection of Broadway and Bond in New York City. I took the photo on September 10, 2001. The front cover layout was done by Ray Miller, and the spine and back were done in-house at iUniverse (and there's a mistake on the back cover if you look hard.)

Tools Used - The entire book was written in Emacs, and the final draft was brought into Microsoft Word right before it went to the publisher. I ran emacs on various Linux systems, and also used various free software tools during writing, like CVS, ispell, and wc. I also wrote a script to log wordcount during the project. Aside from computers, a ton of editing and riffing were done on paper, and I have a huge collection of envelope backs, post-it notes, and index cards from the last seven years.

Last updated Monday, 06-Jun-2005
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