I decided to replace my wireless keyboard last year. I had used that keyboard – shown below and here – for so long that the A, S, D, L and C keys are now blank, The letters E and N are barely there, all worn away from years of typing. The keyboard still works perfectly well. I just wanted to preserve it, frozen in that state, as a tangible reminder of the hours of work I've put into this project. This piece was typed on an identical replacement.

I rarely look down at my keyboard, so the blank keys were never a problem. In fact, those blank keys were a nice testament to the touch-typing skills that I learned from Brother Edmund Miller during my freshman year at La Salle College High School in the Philadelphia suburbs, and to the frequency with which I still put Brother Edmund’s lessons to work.

I have surely done more typing than necessary during this project. Early on, when I realized I needed to impose some semblance of organization on the bundles of research that I had gathered, I began to collate my notes into about two-dozen high-level categories. They included: The Buildup to War, The Fall of France, Negotiations at Mers-el-Kébir, The Battle, etc. I created a file for each topic in Microsoft Word, and I’ve been manually typing my notes ever since.

As tedious and inefficient as this might be, the process of typing my notes provided one additional pass at the information I had harvested, hopefully helping me absorb the most meaningful bits. More important, with my notes now typed into Word I'm able to quickly search my files for names, locations, dates, ships, and authors.

Over time, as I typed note after note after note after note, some chapters spanned hundreds of pages, several have passed the thousand-page mark. One – “The Fall of France” – contains more than 2,900 single-spaced pages of notes

Well before I crossed the thousand-page threshold, I began to wonder if there was a finite limit to a Microsoft Word file, a maximum number of pages that you could type or paste into a single document, and then go no further. I had once “blown up” an old contact management program (a long extinct application called Sidekick, from Starfish Software … I loved that software!), pointlessly adding notes about potential customers after I had passed the word limit that the software provider had neglected to document.

When I sold forecasting and supply planning software, I worked extensively with numbers. Before Excel expanded its capacity sixteen-fold to just over a million rows, I would occasionally max out Excel with more data than a single worksheet could handle.

As I work on my book, I would hate to belatedly learn that a day’s worth of typing about the brotherhood of seafaring men had been for naught. Until this project, I never had to think about filling up a Word file.

As I discovered after a quick bit of research, the maximum size of a Word file is not defined in pages; instead, it’s defined in Megabytes. A Word file is fully saturated when it’s filled with 32 MB worth of text.

It takes quite a bit of typing to create a file of that size. My “Fall of France” file, with a bit more than 2,900 pages (and about 920,000 words) is just under 9.5 MB in size. I would have to reach about 10,000 pages (and over 3 million words) in a single document before I bumped up against the outer edge of Word. The letters Q, Z and X would probably be the only remaining readable keys on my keyboard if I ever got that far.

I will save you the search for comparisons. There are 783,137 words in the King James version of the Bible and a mere 587,387 words in Tolstoy’s War and Peace. “The Fall of France” is just one chapter’s worth of notes. I have a lot of notes.

Megabytes were not a thing when I sat in Brother Edmund’s class in the late 1960s. He graded our typing on accuracy and on words-per-minute. If he knew I would one day do the math for how many minutes it would take me to type 750,000 words, Brother Edmund would have chucked a chalkboard eraser at my head, which is a thing that teachers – Christian Brothers and Immaculate Heart of Mary Nuns in particular - could do back in the days of Remington typewriters.

I learned all kinds of things from the Christian Brothers at my Catholic high school in the Philadelphia suburbs: how to speak halting French, why to question conventional wisdom, how to pray, how to write with imagination, how to type with precision and speed, and how to duck out of the way of chalkboard erasers. To this day, my classmates and I cherish those memories.

Thanks for reading. The dawn of a new year used to the a time of commitment, good cheer, and optimism. There's no reason why we can't embrace those thoughts and ambitions today. OK ... there are actually plenty of reasons! But, to a great extent, life is what you make it. I sincerely hope you're able to make this year the very best for you and those closest to you.

Bill