From: leo@ph.tn.tudelft.nl (Leo Breebaart)
Subject: APF Editorial Comments
Reply-To: leo@ph.tn.tudelft.nl
Organization: Delft University of Technology
Date: Tue, 1 Sep 1992 22:34:25 GMT

I have just posted version 2.0 of the APF to this newsgroup. Hope you enjoy it.
The new version turned out to be so much larger (28 Kb vs. 5 Kb) and
better (page numbers! exact quotes! a thousand elephants!) than the old
one that I decided not to bother with version 1.5 and jump directly to
2.0 instead.

Feedback on v1.4 has really been great -- my thanks to everybody who
e-mailed me or followed-up to it. I can only hope that reactions to
v2.0 will be such that the next version is going to be 3.0 instead of
2.1. You have three weeks...

A few additional remarks I did not want to clog up the APF itself with:

- I hope nobody minds that I quote (i.e: steal) freely from everybody's
mails and articles, without explicit permission or credits. It's just that 
I think long lists of 'contributor names' would be a bother to maintain,
make the APF even larger, and be completely uninteresting to anybody except
the contributors themselves. Doing it this way also allows me to edit, change, 
and mutilate the texts as I see fit without worrying about folks going 
"that's not what I said!'.

- As the APF grows, more and more explanations of 'obvious' jokes are 
creeping in. The trouble is that it simply varies from person to person
which jokes or references are obvious and which aren't, notwithstandig
Terry's protesting that he writes for the average reader. I am still
trying to avoid including things of 'Cohen <--> Conan' triviality, but
it's difficult. What do you do if three persons mail you the same
trivial thing you would never have included yourself? 

- As the APF grows, more and more 'other stuff' is creeping in as well
(e.g. I added a paragraph about the "Neighbour Of The Beast" rumour).
Also, I am including information about what TP did *not* mean as a joke
These additional things still fall under the header 'annotation',
and they nicely complement Nathan's FAQ. Ideally, I would like the APF, like
the FAQ, to serve as a way of avoiding the same topics in a.f.pratchett over
and over again.

- As the APF grows, it gets, well eh, *larger*. It would I suppose be
possible for me make the file available for ftp somewhere, and just post a
periodical pointer to it in a.f.p. Or to start a mailing list for it,
or whatever. But that would mean extra work and bother I don't look
forward to, and frankly I personally feel that if the APF belongs anywhere
it is in this newsgroup, and it's not *that* big yet. But perhaps I 
should post it less often than every three weeks? I appreciate all feedback 
and suggestions on this.


Sorry for ramblin' on, and thanks for listening. We now return you to your 
scheduled "why isn't 'Eric' available in the US"-discussion. (No kidding -- 
I dug my way through all the old a.f.p archives, and if you take away all the 
postings having to do with book-availability and book-listings, you
are left with only a handful of articles. Maybe a FAQ IN CAPITAL LETTERS
would help? Either that or Nathan should up the frequency a bit...)

-- 
Leo Breebaart  (leo @ ph.tn.tudelft.nl)
Newsgroups: alt.fan.pratchett