Epic

 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 relieved to know it's a mere 56,695 words. Les Misérables is about 531k, and War and Peace is 561k. Bleak House, one of my favorite Dickens' works, is 360,947.

I have, essentially, written Bleak House. (Let's just all put aside the fact that Dickens was a seasoned writer when he wrote Bleak House, and the caliber of my writing is not really comparable, even if I did deliver my book in serial format to my very first readers.)

I have written an epic novel.

😳

Cue the wide-eyed stare and the moment of silence.

In fact, one could argue that what I have on my hands is TWO epic novels. Even if I could edit my 400k words down to something closer to 300k, that's still easily two and a scosh of Huck Finn. Arguably, an editor might want to break this into two books, because one thick book is more cost prohibitive than two thinner ones... presumably because in the latter case your readers are paying twice to read the whole story. And also maybe because—this is absolutely a guess—it takes more expensive structural work to hold a greater number of pages within the two sturdy covers.

One the one hand, breaking [insert my cool title here, which I definitely know, but might not be supposed to publish on the internet yet] apart into two books takes a weight off my shoulders. I might, possibly, not have to cut the book's contents by 2/3. (I grant you, there are places where I'm too verbose, but I don't think you can cut the book by 2/3 and still have the same story.)

On the other hand, turning it into two volumes presents its own problems. It was never meant to be two volumes. If you present it as such, it would needs some major rewriting to circumvent those problems.

It probably needs major rewriting anyway. But I won't know, unless and until either I have an incredibly genius stroke of discernment hit me over the head, or I find a good editor who can look at it from a perspective other than what's inside my own head and tell me how to go about this.

I'm really frustrated trying to edit this myself, and I'm really daunted trying to figure out how to find an editor.