Our story so far...

Geez, I feel like one of those bloggers - "I know it has been a long time, blah, blah blah." and I realise I am one of those bloggers.  This reminds me of one time when I was a lad and my roommate had a bit too much one night.  He grabbed a roll of toilet paper on the way to the bathroom and dropped it, but held on to the end of the roll.  For some reason he thought pulling on the end would make the roll come to him - it just kept moving away. That is like where my time has gone of late, but I have been busy.

So, the manuscript is 98% done, the black and white illustrations are ready and finished writing the text to accompany the color illustrations. I am now starting to work on the artist notes so you will all have excellent pictures that Osprey books are known for.  There is a limit to the amount of original art these books can contain so we all have to just deal with it.  That said, I am going for a broad spectrum of normal (lancers and infantry), different (Bar Confederates) and exotic (Janissaries).  I'm sure I will go back to add more information post-publication, but that is a project for another day.  My initial plan is to create additional info as a pdf to download.

On a different note I have done some quick uniform guides for Warlord Games dealing with Polish World War II and Prussian Landwehr (not related, but both of interest to me).  Check out their website, all sorts of goodies and great miniatures. If I can only convince them or the Perry's to do miniatures on this period my work will be done - for now.

I have procured some great material of late.  Gembarzewski's 2 volume work Wojsko Polskie 1807 - 1830 as well a Morawski's illustrated book on the Legions - always planning ahead.

Passing the Bar

Here is the last of the Bar Confederation Cavalry sketches.  Only 2 will make it into the current book.  If anyone has preferences let me know.  Next up will be probably be some infantry from the Barist period - both Government and Confederate.

More Cavalry

Did some more sketches of Bar Cavalrymen for your review.  Not all of these will make it in this book, but we need choices. I have a couple more I will be adding shortly.  I am sending the text for feedback at the moment.

Don't be too judgemental

I started working on the artists notes, so really trained artists can do the center colour plates.  In order to do this I started some watercolor sketches of potential units.  I will be putting up pictures indescriminantly, give me feedback if there are units you want to see more of.  Today I am focusing on the Confederation of the Bar cavalry.  I'm trying to get a good cross section that will give you the feel for the period.  More to come over the next few days. Please let me know what you think.

Why e-books will save publishing

I just received another of my Polish language books in the mail on the Polish Army in the 18th century.  A great book with some good source material, but it still falls short.  The reason is the economics of making a full color book means it is either very expensive to get everything you want in, or you are forced to leave things out to be able to publish it at all.  Don't get me wrong, I'm not one of these new tech people who say books are dead in physical form.  I like the feel of a book, when it is well made it is a thing of beauty, but the finances of publishing means that you can do somethings better in e-books.

First, not everyone has a color e-reader (nook, i-pad, etc) and I find there can be formatting problems in some of these devices to allow color pictures to be seen properly, but when you have a lot of illustrations, it is far cheaper do use an e-format.  For some people this may mean physical books might have websites to provide extra material on-line, or it might mean that at some point e-book sales may be used to help provide impetus for physical books. There are books and information that may not be viable in physical form, but will be allowed to get published in e-book.  I remember a few years ago at Book Expo seeing a book entitled "Birthing Techniques of Azerbajan".  I'm sure it was of use to people who study these things, but how could they afford to publish it?  This is perfect for an e-book.  The drawback is you can publish anything at any time and some non-professional stuff is already creeping onto POD and e-versions at Amazon, but the potential is there for a new burst of information.

In terms of history and especially military history, when studying armies, units and uniforms a picture is worth a thousand words and e-books may be the best way to allow information to get out there.

Writing update

An update on Polish Armies of the Partitions 1770 - 1794.  All the research is done and a first draft is finished.  This means I have enough for two plus books, but I have to edited down to one and still give you enough information to send you on your way.  Diligently working on it - I have my own deadline set for the end of August.

Next steps?  Well for this type book I have to provide the b&w illustrations and give them captions.  I need forty and I have about eighty so it is parse and paste.  Some have to be scanned, but once the office is back in operation it will all be ok.  The author also has to provide artist notes so the illustrator can produce those great pictures that Osprey is known for.  This is probably the most difficult part - you need photos, pictures or details to give the artist info to complete a detailed illustration, historically accurate (or someone will no doubt complain) and describe the scene in such a way that the person doesn't have to keep coming back to you for clarification.  Luckily, I think this is in hand, but it will take time.

 I started working out the illustrations by actually doing a sketch of how I wanted the scenes to look and what was going to be in them.  From there I just needed to collect pictures that would get us to that goal, so most of that is together.  That said it could go all horribly wrong when I hand it in, but we'll keep our fingers crossed.

This isn't to say that I have not been updating things and ideas as I go along - I am still checking to make sure I have details correct and occasionally finding new information, but if you don't draw a line in the sand it will drive you crazy.

I'm working on a new post soon on how gamers actually are the go to guys for this type of history or writting, but more on that later.

More pretty pictures

Finally, the books I ordered from Poland have started to arrive.  Great stuff on the history of artillery and some books for future projects, but it also included post cards I can use as illustrations.  Interesting thing about using pictures - if there are paintings over a certain age they are public domain, but you can't use a photo of say a rifle without permission of the photographer.  All makes sense, but you don't appreciate some of the nuances until you get into it.  I've also had a devil of a time with illustrations with some books from the communist era - many of the publishers don't exist and the rights of some pictures have either lapsed or trying to track down the artists leads to blind alleys.  Luckily I have a good deal of great pictures and artifacts I've collected here and there that suddenly fit together on this project.

Back in Action

I'm finishing up the last bit of research and fitting it into the body on the book.  I'm still waiting on some books I ordered from Poland on artillery of the period.  The great thing about the internet.  In the ye olde days before the internet (sometime before we invented time) you used to have to go to Books-In-Print, look up a book, hope it was still in print and ask your bookseller to order.  A week or two later you may get an answer.  For foreign books, I used to go to foreign language bookstores in NYC, buy something and then write to the publisher.  That was when international postage coupons and money orders rules the day.

I was also lucky in that I had access to NYC public library and the University of Illinois Library at different times and could get access to books and documents fairly easily.  This is were I first ran across Michael Stachowicz and I started collecting information on the Polish army of the 18th century.  Slowly, but surely I get around to things.

Still hard at work

I haven't had time to give an update before now as real-life work and family have crimped some writing time.  I will be off to Book Expo next week, promoting our Black Library line and if the opportunity arises, scoping out books for use in this project or promoting it.  Usually, I am too busy to wander too far, but there is always the potential.

I think part of the challenge to a task like this is not only managing your time to keep it moving forward, but manage your own expectation.  As I delved deeper into the research, I kept finding different avenues to follow.  Even in history, new research replaces old research and theories.  I started using Knotel as the base and expanded from there.    In the process, either the English translation of Knotel was wrong, or he misinterpreted some info because I have found issues in some of his notes.  Additionally, using Polish sources such as Ratajczyk and Gembarzewski has raised more questions as I try to track down information on units formed in the 1790's.  At some point your have to cut off looking and start organizing. I do this periodically to keep ahead of the curve.  But I spent a goo part of the first part of the year translating a book called Zolnierz polski because it was such a good reference source.

In the end, the challenge is going to be not only what I put in this book, but what I have to cut out.  More on that later.

Island of Misfit words

One of the hardest things about writing this history is working within the limits on words.  When you are commissioned to write, most works have parameters on how many words it will contain.  That is because all books have set prices by format and a recommended page count to fit in that format.  Write too many words and you either make the font smaller or include more pages.  If you include more pages you eat into the profit margin.  Make the font too small and people squint to read.  As I went along in the process doing research I was worried at first that  I wouldn't have enough information on uniforms to make this unique.  Now I have to decide what to cut and what will stay - more descriptions or more narratives.  Whatever doesn't make it in the final printed version can always be added in the e-book I guess.  So there are always words that get cut.  Sometimes writers save them to use later, sometimes they just get sent to the Island of misfit words.

Day 2 - still here

I am slowly getting the hang of this and will fill in the blanks.  The pub date of the book is sometime in the later part of 2012 by the fine people at Osprey.  Yes - publishing works that far in advance. Publishers are currently selling in books for the later part of 2011 and early 2012.  In most cases you want something tangible before you announce that you are publishing a book.  I've been working on this - collecting info, sorting through resources, etc since the summer of 2010

So it begins

I decided to launch this on May 3rd, because giving the book I am working on - Polish Armies of the Partitions 1770-1795 what better date to start than the anniversary of the Constitution.  Check in to see what updates I have on this book and any other things I am working on.  A some point I plan to show how to create a Polish Army in miniature.  Good books I have been reading and interesting (I hope) insight into publishing in general.  In addition to this humble work my day job for the past seventeen years has been working in many parts of the publishing industry