It has been a long year with a shoulder injury and procrastination delaying the completion of the new book that I’ve written in collaboration with my father.
But we are now in the final two weeks before launch and it is actually more stressful it seems than all of the editing sessions combined!
Dealing with the various locations of ports and name changes (well things change a lot over 62 years) to dealing with specific nautical terms that were only used on British ships in the sixties. Each new run through brought another set of questions and don’t even get me started on the hand writing – cursive writing is fine, even though I do not have the best hand writing in the world. But try reading a 16 or 17 years olds hand writing, when they are knackered and just want to hit the sack.
That being said, the transcribing was quite relaxing and took about 2 weeks per voyage, first dictating into word – there are definitely a few terms that my accent caused difficultly. The next part of the process was going over what had been dictated into word and reviewing it with the hand written logbook. Finally, the unknown, unsure or damn right illegible words had to be highlighted and brought over to the man who wrote it to give his opinion on what it could have been. There were more than a few times that memory did not serve us well.
Once the voyage had been written up, then it was time to complete the ports of loading list, get the dates listed down and the calculate the total mileage for the journey (in nautical miles of course).
Then for a bit of a laugh I decided that a map of the voyage would be useful to people reading the book – so I did that as well on google maps (a very handy tool I can say) – if I had one improvement I would like to see, it would be the ability to do point to point lines over the sea. Map of the S.S. Ulysses voyage 1962
The above is now complete for all voyages (9) of the midshipman log and we are dealing with the formatting and layout for the ebook and paperback.
As I said, only15 days to go until launch (hopefully), so I better get cracking.
I also better tell you what it is called – “Tales from the Halfdeck” coming in mid-November!
Leave a Reply