Liner Note #29

Someone asked me the other day how long I planned DGC to be. The truth is I don’t know how long it will be. I have various events in the plot planned out, but my estimates of length I’ve tried to make so far have always been wrong.

I certainly never expected that the two months of the “1989” tour would take two YEARS of the serial to tell, and over a quarter million words! If we count the end of the tour as the end of the fifth ebook volume, then here are the word counts so far:

Vol One: 46,068
Vol Two: 104,577
Vol Three: 83,891
Vol Four: 148,069
Vol Five: 108,608

Add all five together and you get just under 500,000 words. (491,213 if you want to be exact about it.)

For comparison, the seven volumes of the Harry Potter series total to 1,084,170 words (according to the Internet. I didn’t count them myself.) So by the time Ziggy gets out of rehab… the boys will be halfway to defeating Voldemort!

OK, but seriously, I know we’ve got at least one more volume of 100K which equals at least one more year to go. But given that the tour I thought was going to take one year to do has ended up being two years, I clearly just can’t estimate this one for beans. It’ll be done when it’s done.

I feel confident I’ll know when that is. Daron will tell me. Me trusting him to figure out how much time to take to tell the story has worked out well so far, so I’m not going to mess with it now. Giving him free rein seems to work.

(By the way, that doesn’t mean I don’t rein him in *sometimes*. He does need some editing.)

I’ll be very tickled if we surpass the Harry Potter books, though I doubt right now that it will. Plus there would be something majestic about hitting a million words. But I’m not going to put goals or limits on it. When the end comes, we’ll know. And I know we ain’t there yet.

Speaking of volume 5 of the ebooks, I will put it together soon. It’s more important to me that I keep up the output on the serial online, and I have a novel due at Hachette on July 15th. So it’s likely the ebook won’t be out until after that.

I also haven’t forgotten the short stories I owe you all. Colin, Jonathan, and Ziggy will each get one. They’re coming.

Daron wanted me to share this video with you, from the Space Station.

Not only is it ridiculously cool that it’s the best Bowie reference ever, one of the things Daron likes about it is that the guy clearly isn’t a pro. The democratization of music, putting it in the hands of people and not just “stars,” he loves it. He loves the 21st century. Okay, why isn’t he telling you this himself? He’s busy. He left me in charge today.

Another really cool video we stumbled onto on Youtube, Music Painting. You don’t have to be able to read music to appreciate this one, but if you do, it’s even cooler. Actually this video might be the closest thing to illustrating what reading music IS without actually teaching it that I’ve ever seen.

I feel the need to mention that The Waterboys are coming on tour:
http://launch.dir.groups.yahoo.com/group/waterpeople/message/26217

And so are Nine Inch Nails. (Just Google them. They’re easy to find.) NIN will be playing the TD Garden here in Boston, and I have a fan login to a presale, but I’m not sure I can go. And the special fan tickets are non-transferable. So I may miss them.

On the other hand we have tickets to see the English Beat on corwin’s birthday. It’s funny, I went several years where I didn’t see any live shows at all. Now all of a sudden I’m back in the habit of doing it again. I think it was Amanda Palmer and Grand Theft Orchestra who reminded me. Okay, and writing Daron on stage every day for two years probably had something to do with it, too. Sometimes we write about the thing we lack.

Have I talked about the new David Bowie album yet? It’s a delicious album for musical gourmets. Not earth-shattering, but it doesn’t feel like it’s trying to be. I’ve written to it on “repeat” many nights now.

Bowie is possibly the most self-aware performer out there, and that dates all the way back to the self-referentiality of Ziggy Stardust. If you haven’t seen the “Jazzin for Blue Jean” video in full length in a while, it’s a hilarious commentary on stardom:

And now the current video making the rounds from the new album, which comments not only on stardom, but aging (and is one of the most delightfully genderbent pieces of film ever):

Daron has no comment. Not right now, anyway. There will be plenty of rumination on fame in the chapters coming up. Hollywood is weird, man.