And They Fledge...

October 31st was a big day for me. It had nothing to do with Halloween, although E made a pretty cute Hermione Granger. She pulled together a school girl outfit with a skirt, tee and sweater, and though she doesn't own Mary Janes, the gold and silver stars on her black ankle boots were fitting enough. And thanks to our neighbors, who tend to do Halloween in a big way and keep a box of costumes in the attic, she had an actual Gryffindor robe, complete with embroidered Hogwarts crest.  She also had a pretty cool-looking wand, magically fashioned once upon a time of chopstick and hot glue, which her brother had brought home years ago from a Harry-Potter-themed birthday party (at the same neighbors' house). With the magic of Hairstory's Powder and Undressed , it was not at all hard to give her some adorably wild hair, and we have a resulting video of her saying (in a convincingly snooty voice), "It's levi-OH-sa, not levio-SAH. And by the way, you have some dirt on yo

Just this morning, I finished Revision 3 of The Gatherer. This is such an accomplishment, on so many levels! The original word count was 409, 113. E, bless her, has read every single one of those words more than once. She's a major fan of this story. And that's a lot of words. My goal was to reduce it to under 300,000. Well, my real goal in editing was to tell the story without any redundancies, verbosities, unnecessary repetition, or wordiness in general. (In other words, my aim was to make it the exact opposite of that previous sentence, did you catch my joke?) And in the process, I hoped to reduce it to under 300,000 words—which was a lofty goal, considering that was a reduction of over 25%. I am very happy with the results. I feel that I did, indeed, tell the story in the best way I know how. I streamlined the text and took my expression to a higher level of efficiency and elegance. I cut out scenes that were unnecessary back story that the reader doesn't need. I cut o

You just can't hand a 409k word manuscript to a potential editor and ask if they would please wade through it and see if they want to invest in you as a writer. It would be simply too embarrassing. You've got to at least try to come up with an edited version. I was tearing my hair out trying to figure out how to edit this phhhhhat caterpillar of mine, and then I had a breakthrough. I'm now about 30% of the way through the story, and I have reduced the word count to 62% of the original, up to this point. How did I do that? You're dying to know; I know you are. (Or else you aren't, in which case, you're not reading this blog.) I stopped trying to figure out what to cut out. Instead, I created a blank document (titled, no joke, "Painful Big Picture Exercise") and began trying to decide what to allow in. I had two big milestones towards which I needed to move the book—quickly, without wasting the reader's time. By the time you get to the first, you hav

 I've been doing a little research. When one says one has written a "novel," one generally means something in the neighborhood of 80k to 110k words. A typical fantasy novel tends to be in the upper reaches of that range, somewhere between 90k and 110k words. And anything over 110k words is considered an "epic novel."  Now, oddly enough this information comes from Foster Grant. Yes, the sunglasses (and reading glasses) company. Apparently they are big proponents of equipping people's eyes to read books, so they blog a lot about books and reading. They suggest their statistics are really approximations from various sources, but it sure sounds plausible the way they say it. They list some word counts of novels and epic novels. Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn — if you have it on your shelf, as I do, you know how fat that paperback is — is 109,571 words. In case you're stuck having to read William Faulkner's Lord of the Flies , you'll probably be

When you're writing a novel, it's like this living thing that you're constantly nurturing and developing.  And then when it's over, it's done. No more life. Everything is now in past tense.  In a crazy way, it's like the death of a friend.  You have the finished work, but you're no longer actively creating it, and so it's not living and breathing anymore.  It's a little like watching videos of your friend—the record of the life is there, and you enjoy that, but there will never be any new records, because there will never be any new life. You don't have that kind of relationship with a book you're simply reading, because you're not the one creating it. You're free to let someone else's story unfold in front of your eyes, a wondrous tale that is fresh and new because you don't yet know all of it. And then when it's over, you'll never again read it for the first time, but you can revisit it however often you want, just l

Just this Saturday, I reached a huge milestone.  I finished the first draft of the novel that I started almost two decades ago. I can't believe that I have finally told the whole story! And interestingly, since then I've been struggling with a weird sort of grief. It boils down to this: I've created a wonderful, fat, adorable caterpillar, of which I'm very fond. And now the caterpillar has to turn into a butterfly, which will involve some painful transformation. hello, world, I'm new here! And I don't know what the butterfly will look like, and if I'll love it as much as I love the caterpillar... and the fact is that at the end of the process, it will have changed and become something else.  No one else will ever really, truly understand what that caterpillar means to me... all the blood, sweat, and tears— and just me—  that I poured into it.  And part of me is afraid that when the process is complete and the caterpillar has morphed and flown away, I'll