My book on Memory Palaces is slowly taking shape. The draft is 169 pages and expect it to end up 150 pages long after I edit down.

I’ve been working on the index, which means I get to amuse myself with this sort of entry:

There are five big tasks to do:

  • Complete the diagrams (for which I’m learning TikZ, so progress is slow)
  • Restructure the chapter on classes
  • Rewrite the ‘putting it together’ chapter
  • Rewrite the ‘fluffy’ chapter
  • Put the whole text through XKCD’s simplewriter which is my go-to place for tightening up writing. This is technically the biggest step, but it’s the one I’m most looking forward to.

After that it can go to serious proofreaders.

Some general notes:

  • Despite having written several hundred pages of Latex, minutely checked by the author of a book on Latex, I still need to look up quite a lot of things about typesetting.
  • Despite having published 50 or so books by hand (WWW has produced more, but I have other people to do that now) I still forget things, leave errors in, and generally am Not On Top

Both of these make me quite aware that self publishing would be extremely hard to do without this background.