And They Fledge...

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 ...