The Human Squirrel Cage Book Is Closer To Being Done

I began to think I would never see daylight at the end of this manuscript. Even now, the light is somewhat faint, but at least I'm now working on data for the Year 2000 and beyond. When you're dealing with information that goes back to 1845, a twenty-year span is a trifle.

The notes for the Human Squirrel Cage book stands at 199,699 and that will grow as I add in the last twenty years of abstracted data. That makes the notes alone 387,588 words shorter than War and Peace. Tolstoy I am not. The rough draft of the actual book, where it stands at present, is 63,075. There will be a few thousand more words added to it, too, but it should come out, roughly, to the size of an average novel today. That would make it far shorter than Crime and Punishment by Dostoyevsky, which was around 211,000 words and about 430 pages. 

I hope the Human Squirrel Cage will prove to be an interesting book, certainly more fascinating than your average grocery list. I don't know yet how the companion book, Thanks For The Hospitality . . . But We Gotta Go is going to fare, but with more than forty escapes, numerous attempts, and some pretty interesting characters, I will not be surprised if it's at least half the size of the Human Squirrel Cage book, around 40,000, maybe less. One can't just write about the escapes without a bit of background, too.

I know it has taken a long time to make progress on these books. Each time I sit down to write I realize there is a gap that needs filled, and new data keeps coming in. However, I am now writing the chapter(s) concerning our present-day jail, which is now thirty-two years old - just over one-third as old as the rotary jail, not even middle-aged. That means that there is an end in sight. I'm eager to share the book with you, so don't lose heart. I have been editing as I go, so that process shouldn't take as long. I hesitate to set a release date, at this point, largely because the last two have come and gone before. So, I'm keeping that information locked away until the last second.