The Annotated Pratchett File, v7a

The Annotated Pratchett File v7a.5

alt.fan.pratchett, alt.books.pratchett

Preface to v7a.5

This is not the new release of the Annotated Pratchett File.

This is a development version, a work in progress, an unfinished business.

Since 1996 I have kept everybody waiting for a new release of the APF (version 9.0, internal codename: the Pointless Albatross release). Real life kept interfering, and year after year passed without anything happening.

I did do large amounts of work behind the scenes, but there was never enough time to take things all the way, to fully research and edit the raw material, to wrap everything up into something releasable. Worse, it didn’t look as if this situation was going to change. The time had come for me to face reality, and either give up entirely, or else make some radical changes to the way I had been approaching the job of editing and releasing the APF. I decided to change, and you are now looking at the results.

The first major change is that I have abandoned the concept of releasing only complete updates to the Annotated Pratchett File, in which all of the annotation sections for all of the books are fully updated. From now on, the APF will be updated incrementally: book-by-book, section-by-section, and sometimes even annotation-by-annotation. There will, eventually, be a version 9.0, a proper “stable release”, but until that happens the intermediate stages on the 7a.5 “development branch” will be available for public viewing.

The second major change is that I have abandoned the concept of doing the entire core researching/editing job by myself without outside help. From now on, I will share that job with Mike Kew, a.k.a. Miq—a name that should be familiar and welcome to all alt.books.pratchett and alt.fan.pratchett readers. Mike and I will be able to work in parallel on different stages of the editing process, and as a result progress can be made even if one of us is occupied with other commitments.

What has changed in version 7a.5? The single most important change is that we have added 204 new annotations (well over 1500 lines of text), finally bringing Feet of Clay and Hogfather into the domain of annotated books.

The rest of the Annotated Pratchett File has stayed mostly the same, except for the occasional rewritten section (such as this Preface). This also implies that some of the unchanged bits have now become outdated, because they still refer to the situation of the previous 7a.0 release. That is one of the disadvantages of going public with a development version: perfectionism has to take a back seat to pragmatism, and loose ends will dangle visibly until they get tied up.

In the same vein, the new annotations have not been proofread (yet) by my usual team of APF proofreaders, they only cover a period of e-mail submissions and afp logs from July 1996 until December 1998, and v7a.5 will only be available as ASCII text and on the L-Space Web, not in any of the other formats (PostScript, MS Word) that v7a.0 was released in.

I can only hope that finally being able to read new APF annotations for the first time in four years will be enough make up for such occasional rough edges.

Leo Breebaart

Delft, Hogswatch 2000