David Moore

Wednesday, December 10, 2003

Pulling the last bits together on the book – time for a dedication and some acknowledgements.

The dedication’s simple enough – I promised it to my nephews, one of whom bears the name Columbanus as a direct result of my bike journey. I feel responsible, so the least I can do is dedicate the book to him.

Acknowledgements? Well, there are a few people who have really helped, so they get a mention. I reckoned I should also thank everyone whose good quotes I’ve shamelessly purloined and used in the book.

And I got to use that old reliable of academic publishing: ‘any mistakes that remain, are, of course, entirely my own.’ Or words to that effect.

Wednesday, November 26, 2003

So yesterday I got all my stuff together to claim the Artists Exemption on my book. This means I won’t have to pay tax on the income from it – no complaints here about that. My accountant was delighted when I told him I was writing a book – ‘It’s great,’ he said. ‘A legal way to avoid paying tax.’ And he doesn’t even have to be creative.

There’s a good chance that the amount I make will be so little that even with the day job, I wouldn’t be liable for tax anyway, but I was thinking positively as I filled in the forms.

Under the regulations, the books has to contain artistic or cultural merit, and the Revenue Commissioners reserve the right to have someone judge that for them – there’s a job I’d like see advertised.

For a non-fiction book like mine, there are some extra requirements. Textbooks or books that help you do your job don’t count, nor do most collections of journalism, but other things are fine: literary criticism, autbiography, and the vague ‘heritage value’ clause.

The book should fall into any number of categories, but we’ll see what the Revenue think.

Sunday, November 09, 2003

I’m done. Can I have my life back now please? After a month of working all but full-time at the day job and coming home to work flat out on the book, I’m delivering the final draft tomorrow.

I think it’s better than it was, but there’s a wood and trees thing going on, so I really can’t tell any more. At a micro level, a large number of the individual sentences have definitely improved. It’s a little scary how much work the manuscript could still soak up productively.

The word count is down from 85,000 to 78,000, and I reckon you’d be hard pushed to spot the removals. A few bits that I liked had to go, which was sad, but I realised that me liking them wasn’t a good enough reason for them to stay in, if they upset the flow of things. Maybe I’ll do a collectors’ edition with a DVD of deleted scenes. Most of them revolve around food. But most of the deletions have been the odd sentence here or there, or even a clause that’s been tightened. Out went a lot of the adjectives too.

Halfway through the edits I was grumpy as fuck and wanted to throw the laptop out the window. It’s been the hardest part of the process so far.

I’ll see the damn thing twice more – once when the line by line edits come back, and again when the page proofs are ready. But even if I think another month could improve the book further, the law of diminishing returns kicks in, and I just couldn’t bring myself to keep polishing indefinitely. All my journalism and web writing experience has taught me just to get it out the door and leave it at that.

Thursday, November 06, 2003

The bike I used for the first trip (from Bangor to Bobbio) was nothing special, but now I’m finishing off the book of the trip, I realse it’s got an amazing claim to fame – it’s not had a puncture. Ever.

It’s now been over two and half years since I put the Conti Top Touring tyres on it, and rode 2000 miles across Europe – with no punctures. That was amazing enough, but since then the poor loyal Dawes has been relegated to hack bike, as I hauled myself to work down the East Wall Road. And still no puncture.

The tyres have regularly been topped up with air, but never completely deflated. Does this mean there’s ancient air in those tubes? Or French or Italian air left over from the trip?