Below is a copy of Robert Fear's guest blog published yesterday on Rukia Publishing's website:
The second edition of Fred’s Diary is on target for release in mid-October.
It was originally written on the travels that Fred took around Asia between February and July 1981. He had never committed any of his previous travels to paper in the way he did for this long awaited journey into the unknown. The final collection runs to 600 pages of closely written detail.
When Fred landed in Hong Kong in that February he had two small carbon copy books of 100 pages each and he started writing everything down about his impressions, the people he met, the things he did and thought, what he ate and what things cost. As his journey developed the diary became almost a mission of its own, especially when the unexpected happened in Thailand.
The first two books lasted two months and Fred had to buy additional copies along the way, all used with carbon paper. Every few weeks he would send the originals back to his friend Jan, in Frankfurt, Germany. She collected all the pages in an A4 folder and luckily they all made it back safely. Fred kept all the copies with him as a backup.
After returning from his travels, Fred settled again in Frankfurt and stayed there for five years. He then returned to England and took the A4 folder containing the diary with him. It was almost forgotten for many years, only making an appearance when friends asked to see it or to read it.
It wasn’t until around 2005 that Fred decided to start typing up the diary onto his computer. He managed to get the first two months done but then ran out of motivation.
A couple of years later there was an article in a PC magazine about Kindle and self-publishing that sparked his interest again. He started working on the second part of the diary and released it in 2009 as Time in Thailand. The first part followed in 2011, published as £99 to Hong Kong.
By now the bug had truly bitten and Fred started planning the release of the whole diary. First though, he had to scan copies of all 600 pages as they were deteriorating and writing was becoming faded in parts. Over the next two years he typed everything up and started editing the diary for publication, all in his spare time.
Fred’s Diary 1981 was self-published in December 2013 and has been relatively successful with a good number of excellent reviews on Amazon UK and US. It is a long book though. The paperback version is 564 pages and contains 165K words.
Over the past year further editing work has been going on. You may have seen the daily serialisation of Fred’s Diary on the blog fd81.net earlier this year. This version had already been edited down to 135K words.
Further editing has taken place since then and the second edition will contain less than 100K words, with around 360 pages. It has also had a professional final edit and there is a wonderful new cover which we are revealing today.
Thank you Robert, everyone at Rukia Publishing wishes you every success with the new edition.
Watch out for the release of Fred’s Diary 1981 in mid-October 2015.
The second edition of Fred’s Diary is on target for release in mid-October.
It was originally written on the travels that Fred took around Asia between February and July 1981. He had never committed any of his previous travels to paper in the way he did for this long awaited journey into the unknown. The final collection runs to 600 pages of closely written detail.
When Fred landed in Hong Kong in that February he had two small carbon copy books of 100 pages each and he started writing everything down about his impressions, the people he met, the things he did and thought, what he ate and what things cost. As his journey developed the diary became almost a mission of its own, especially when the unexpected happened in Thailand.
The first two books lasted two months and Fred had to buy additional copies along the way, all used with carbon paper. Every few weeks he would send the originals back to his friend Jan, in Frankfurt, Germany. She collected all the pages in an A4 folder and luckily they all made it back safely. Fred kept all the copies with him as a backup.
After returning from his travels, Fred settled again in Frankfurt and stayed there for five years. He then returned to England and took the A4 folder containing the diary with him. It was almost forgotten for many years, only making an appearance when friends asked to see it or to read it.
It wasn’t until around 2005 that Fred decided to start typing up the diary onto his computer. He managed to get the first two months done but then ran out of motivation.
A couple of years later there was an article in a PC magazine about Kindle and self-publishing that sparked his interest again. He started working on the second part of the diary and released it in 2009 as Time in Thailand. The first part followed in 2011, published as £99 to Hong Kong.
By now the bug had truly bitten and Fred started planning the release of the whole diary. First though, he had to scan copies of all 600 pages as they were deteriorating and writing was becoming faded in parts. Over the next two years he typed everything up and started editing the diary for publication, all in his spare time.
Fred’s Diary 1981 was self-published in December 2013 and has been relatively successful with a good number of excellent reviews on Amazon UK and US. It is a long book though. The paperback version is 564 pages and contains 165K words.
Over the past year further editing work has been going on. You may have seen the daily serialisation of Fred’s Diary on the blog fd81.net earlier this year. This version had already been edited down to 135K words.
Further editing has taken place since then and the second edition will contain less than 100K words, with around 360 pages. It has also had a professional final edit and there is a wonderful new cover which we are revealing today.
Thank you Robert, everyone at Rukia Publishing wishes you every success with the new edition.
Watch out for the release of Fred’s Diary 1981 in mid-October 2015.
