What does it take to write a book? (Part 2)

So what does it take to write a book, besides letting the housework go to hell? Here's what I did for my book over the last nine months:

• Read 40 books cover to cover
• Read portions of another 23 books
• Read over 100 articles or encyclopedia entries (from databases or web sites)
• Compiled almost 1100 pages of single-spaced notes
• About 575 of those pages were written by me on books I read
• The other 525 were copied/pasted from online articles
• That breaks down to about 646,000 words of notes (338K original/308K copied)
• Chose 45 images to be included in the book
• Chose and excerpted 16 primary sources to be included in the book

And what did I end up with?

• A prologue and seven chapters totaling just over 38,000 words
• 12 primary sources totaling 18,720 words
• 10 biographies totaling 11,180 words
• An overwhelming sense of relief and accomplishment!

There still might be a few tweaks here and there (maybe a primary source or image cut here and there), and I won't know the final page count until the book is typeset, but I think I can feel confident that I was pretty thorough in doing my research and writing. We'll see when the book comes out and the reviews come in next spring.