50k!
Updates May 23rd, 2006Stayed up until one this morning working on the book, pushing to the 25% mark. I feel like I should celebrate or something! You know, open wide the door to the party yurt, drink goat’s milk, and eat strudel.
Afterward I stayed up for another two and a half hours to finish reading the book a friend of mine wrote. Any book that keeps me up that late has got to be a good. I’d recommend it to all ya’ll but it hasn’t been published yet. He’s written some great short stories that have been published in some of the top markets, like Writers of the Future and Analog. He’s definitely a writer to watch and an all-around nice guy, too.
My current opinion of my own book is that it’s moving way too slowly. The book’s about a place called Nethermore, and I haven’t even gotten the characters there yet! I’m barely coming upon the first major confrontation of the book and I’m already (supposedly) a quater of the way through.
They say you should write what you like to read. Maybe I should have held off on the Robert Jordan and Tad Williams when I was growing up.
May 23rd, 2006 at 9:06 pm
Tad Williams, maybe. Robert Jordan, definitely.
You’ll probably have to lop off a good portion of the beginning when you edit, but that’s no big deal, right? From personal experience I can tell you that there are few greater pleasures in life than cutting out a large block of text.
May 24th, 2006 at 10:06 am
I’ve been writing this thing with the intention of fixing a lot of things “in post.” Included in that will be quite the edit where I chop out a lot of verbage.
The story I’m sending to Writers of the Future this month weighed in at about 25k. After an edit or three, I was able to get it down to 18k. (Still need to cut another 1k.) Amazing the things we writers include in a story that really don’t need to be there.
As for my story having a long beginning, I looked in Eye of the World last night and discovered that at 50k words, Rand hadn’t even left the Two Rivers yet. With the later revisions, I think my beginning will work just fine.