Looking at the books

Morning.

Thanks to Andrew A for filling in yesterday, for the 83rd time apparently. Assuming each post is has between 800 and 1000 words (generally that’s the case), that’s somewhere between 66400 and 83000 words on this website. Which is, essentially, about the word count of your typical novel (using around 80,000 words as a median for that). I should also point out this doesn’t include the many tens/hundreds of thousands of words Andrew has written on Arseblog News, but I don’t have the gumption to go down that road this morning. Suffice to say, there are plenty more books under his belt.

So then I got curious. Tim Stillman, whose column has been running on the site for around 15 years now, has 776 posts. Some of these would also include a bit of blog fill-in when I’ve been away on holidays. Using the same metrics, that’s a word count of between 620,800 and 776,000 – 8 to 9 novels. I could see Tim writing that many books, to be fair.

Perhaps a series of detective stories about a football and indie music loving cop called Gabriel Henry, down on his luck, likes a drink etc. The TV series when it’s commissioned (not on Amazon), might see someone like Tom Hardy in the main role (Gary Oldman is too old), but his footballing loyalties are unclear. I suspect Tim would insist upon an Arsenal fan being his protagonist, someone who understood how that shapes a man to elicit the best possible performance, but he’d also eschew the most obvious choices. It’s indie after all. I’m thinking Jamie Bell.

Consulting producer Leandro Trossard would try and get Anne Hathaway involved as the ex-wife he still loves but can’t stay committed to because of ‘the job’ (and the drink), but sadly scheduling issues and the filming of The Devil Wears Prada 4: The Re-Prada-ing prevent her from committing to the project.

Theme tune: Bernard Butler and Little Simz.

So then, since I started this website in 2002, I’ve made 10597 posts. Some of these are shorter than others, the posts announcing a live blog etc, so let’s discard those. There are, according to our back-end (oooh-errr), 690 of those. So that leaves 9907, and for the sake of consistency I’m going to apply the same word count guide, which gives us somewhere between 7,295,600 and 9,907,00 words. That’s the equivalent of 91 to 123 novels in that time period.

Which is a lot of books. Probably too many books. I think we’re heading towards Terry Pratchett territory here. Or, if we widen it out to a cinematic point of view, something like the Marvel Universe which seems to churn out about 123 films a year with characters you never even knew existed.

‘Opening this Friday, it’s Son of Ant-Man versus Godzilla Junior versus Turns His Eyelids Inside-Out Boy – The Musical! Starring Daniel Day-Lewis and Jessie Buckley …’

The idea of writing 123 books is vaguely absurd. I’m sure it’s been done, but I think I’d have gone out of my mind if I’d done that in the same time period. It’s 5 books a year, given that tomorrow will see Arseblog turn 24 years old. That’s a lot of episodes of a TV show, and/or movies. Eventually it would get like Batman, where you have the original then the origin story, then a few years later another origin story except this time ‘darker’, then the spin-offs, the sequels, and the sequels of sequels, and then maybe a Christopher Nolan version which plays out backwards but also forwards and sideways while twirling always twirling, but also in a dream inside the mind of a man who may or may not exist at this point, with some epic music in the soundtrack, and with dialogue muffled and made hard to hear properly by low-rumbling synth sounds in the background at all times.

Having signed away all creative control for a massive amount of money so I can go live somewhere warm where I can wear shorts and a t-shirt all day every day, poor Mark Strong is flogged relentlessly by the evil studio executives in the role of Arseblog. He’s the obvious choice, because obviously he’s a massive Arsenal fan, but when it boils right down to it, we have the same hair cut.

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Anyway, as you can see this is a quiet week, and I’m thankful for that and your indulgence today. ‘Normal’ service will likely resume tomorrow as we look forward to the Champions League draw, and Sunday’s game against Chelsea.

We will have an Arsecast for you a bit later, I’m gonna be joined by the author of the Gabriel Henry book series for a statements style podcast, so stand-by for that. In the meantime, have a good one folks.

PS – for those of you who saw the title and looked forward to an in-depth look at Arsenal’s latest accounts, I apologise.

PPS – I’m not that sorry though.

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