time invested in "TTP"

About a month ago I promised myself that I would start recording the amount of time it took me to do everything in this project so that in the end I could say that i took ### man hours to complete. This evening as I finished transcribing the postscript I realized that I still have yet to record anything. Thee some things I can pretty accurately guess For instance:

- The postscript took 3hours to write (because I had to actually put my process down on paper and was cross referencing to make sure the information I was writing was correct)
- The postscript took 4 hours to transcribe because I had to continually edit the information in my head
- "Host of the Air" took 3 hours to transcribe and 1 hour to find
- I have spent about 13 hours dreaming up illuminated letters and other illustrations (you don't see all the spectacular epic fails).
- 15 hours (if not more) searching for and identifying alchemical imagery in the texts
- About 10 hours finding the correct texts to begin with (I'm pretty picky)

That all adds up to 30 minutes shy of 50 hours.

If you consider that each of the poems transcribed took between 2 and 3.5 hours each to transcribe and about 30 minutes to proof read you can add in another 21 hours on average making the total roughly 71 hours. Then factor in a good 20 hours of semi-extraneous research on my part concerning topical information and art materials, and the total swells to an estimated 91 hours. Id' say when all is said and done, A good 100 hours have been invested so far in this version of the project. I say this version b/c I have gone through the text choosing and transcription process two and a half times prior to settling on William Butler Yeats. At this moment I'm afraid to think about the amount of time invested in this piece, counting those two and a half failed attempts.

Sometimes I'm a little sad inside to think that I'm investing all this time, and yet the work will result in only one singular hand bound volume. However, what a fantastic singular volume it will be.