What Are You Doing Now?

[Eddie Muir]

Oh yes, almost forgot — Happy Anniversary, Eddie and Chick! Hope you've had a lovely special day.

Thank you, Courtenay. We had a super day.

[pete9012S]

Yes,happy anniversary Eddie & Chick.
Where did that last year go!!!

[Eddie Muir]

Thank you. Pete.

The last year has just flown by.

[Lucky Star]

Happy Anniversary Eddie and Chick. I'm sure you both had a wonderful time; particularly Chick as it was alsop Mother's Day so a double celebration for her.

[Eddie Muir]

Thanks, John. We had a great weekend of celebrations. As you rightly say, not only was it our Wedding Anniversary yesterday, it was also Mother's Day and today is the 47th birthday of our son, Neil. So we had a three-way family celebration yesterday.

[KEVP]

I suppose having to drive in the dark COULD be the cause for the increase in traffic accidents, but everyone is implying that it is because the drivers are sleepy.

But the darkness wouldn't cause strokes. The strokes seem to be caused by the lack of sleep. This is why I try to get a full eight hours every night.

[Chrissie777]

But it's only One night and one hour.

[Rob Houghton]

What I'm doing now is trying to cut my Barney mystery, 'The Rawlins' Reach Mystery' down from 72,195 words to a more Enid-Blyton-like word-count!!! I don't think I'll manage it!

[Chrissie777]

Rob, that would be such a pity! Why can't it be as long as it is? Is the amounts of chapters a must?

[Rob Houghton]

I don't think I will really cut that much out. It doesn't really have to be a certain length, although I do try to make them a similar length to the originals. My Famous Five was much longer too. This book is 32 chapters long - which is one chapter longer than The Rilloby Fair Mystery -- but each chapter averages around 2, 400 words, which is quite a bit longer than Enid's chapters.

[Chrissie777]

This book is 32 chapters long - which is one chapter longer than The Rilloby Fair Mystery -- but each chapter averages around 2, 400 words, which is quite a bit longer than Enid's chapters.

Can't see anything wrong with that.
In any case, I would certainly love to read it in it's entirety/long version later on (once you've published the shortened version chapter by chapter on EBS).

[Rob Houghton]

I don't think I'll actually cut any more out of it - just going to go through it again tomorrow and check things.

It will be quite a while before its 'published' on EBS (if ever!) as there are other things in the pipeline, I think.

[sixret]

Now that you've mentioned it, I am very curious to know. What is the typical range of Enid Blyton-word-count for her books?

[Rob Houghton]

It depends on which book and series - I think the Barney books are around 60,000 words but some (like Ragamuffin) are of course shorter.

I think Famous Five are around 40,000 words but this is only rough estimate. I think Tony has official word-counts for each series somewhere.

[Wolfgang]

I personally wouldn't give too much thought about body, ah, word-count, Rob. If you take the adventure series as an example (I happen to have the Piper editions from the late eighties, without illustrations), you'll see that usually there was a chapter about 6 pages long (apart from some odd chapters) in the first seven books, while in "River" they had only 5 pages as an average.