The Book of Masks Homepage

Ten Year Anniversary

So, esteemed reader Kenny has been reminding me for awhile that "The Book of Masks"  is coming up on its tenth anniversary.

And today is it. This universe is now officially ten years old.

Okay, 12-30-2008 was the day I created the interactive and posted the first few chapters: "Prologue in a Book Store"  "The Fake Book"  "Making a Mask"  "The Solo Magician"  "Myself, the Guinea Pig" . But except for a few chapters posted in January and December of 2009, it was dormant for almost two years. Not until November of 2010 did it really get going. (I think I had it locked under "Private access" until then.)

But still ... Ten years.

Are there any other statistics I could mention?

Well, as I post this, it has 2997 chapters, but that includes appendices and a few blog-like entries. If we subtract those, it stands at 2968 chapters; though if we include the spin-off/sequel interactive "The Wandering Stars"  then the number rises to 3431.

That works out to a publishing rate of almost 1 chapter a day, and more than 1 chapter a day if we lop off those two dormant years at the start.

I don't know how many words are in it, but each chapter probably averages around 1500 words apiece. (Most of my chapters come in at around 1725 words, but I'll be conservative in my estimates.) That means that BoM/TWS between them contain about 5 million words. That's more than 10x longer than The Lord of the Rings, and five times longer than the Harry Potter series. If most novels run between 50K and 100K words, then BoM/TWS is equivalent to between 50 and 100 novels.

EDIT: Wordsmitty asks how many page views Chapter One has. I've never really paid much attention. So let's see:

The description page for BoM has 117,205. Chapter One (The Prologue) itself has 112,517.

Ouch. Maybe I should revise the Prologue, for the first real chapter ("The Fake Book") has 27,424.

* * *

I don't mention all that to brag. I sure as hell didn't do it all myself, and you all know that this thing has had a lot of contributors, from rugal (most especially) and imaj and Wordsmitty and smitch, as well as past contributors (like Collider) whose names have vanished off their chapters after contributing some fantastic ideas to it.

No, I emphasize those big numbers above because they're a testimony to steady work. If a journey of a thousand miles consists of hundreds of individual steps, then the composition of a 5 million word interactive universe consists in writing one chapter at a time. Patience and perseverance can do amazing things, as anyone who's seen what a stream of water did to the Grand Canyon can attest.

I mentioned the work of my fellow contributors above. I have to give enormous thanks to them, for their help in making this ... thing. Not just for their own contributions of words and ideas, both inside the interactive and privately in email conversations, but also for liking it and being enthused enough by it to add to it. I am also deeply grateful to its readers. There aren't many of you, but each one of you, whether you've corresponded with me or have just been a number in the "Page Views" statistic, boosted my morale immensely. Authors are fond of saying that they are sustained by their readers, and that is certainly true in this case. It doesn't take many of you to keep me writing. Each of you is like a tankful of high-grade fuel.

Is there another ten years in this thing? I sure don't want to make any promises, and there have been plenty of times in the past when I thought it had exhausted itself. All I can say now is what I would have said ten (or eight) years ago when I started:

Let's write another chapter today, and let the tomorrows take care of themselves.