Word count marathon, day 3

Starting word count: 244,962

Ending word count after revising Chapters 24 through 26, 29, part of 30: 243,576

# words cut: 1,386

Now that I’m into the pages past where Cat and I have done editing already, there are bigger trims I can make. I still don’t know where the big, big cutting is going to happen. I jumped ahead from chapter 8 yesterday into the section starting around Chapter 24 because that section (that goes through Chapter 32) is where I’ve always thought the story could be tightened. It’s an intentional lull, but it lulls too much there. So.

Nonetheless, I know I’m not going to magically get my 150 pages out of those chapters; we’ll see what the rest of 30, 31, and 32 yield, then I have some more ideas where I can make some inroads. And then depending on the outcome of that, I’m going to have to consider removing plotlines and/or characters. I’m not against it, but it’s far more complicated and time-consuming in this particular story than a less intricately-plotted one.

As for my pitch paragraph…well. All I can say is thank the Universe, Eru, and The Great Pumpkin for wickedly awesome and talented Cat, because she is the reason I did not have a breakdown about my pitch this evening. In response to my email of OMG I AM FUNCTIONALLY ILLITERATE THIS IS NOT WORKING WHAT ARE WORDS AND WHY DO I HAVE RED INK RUNNING OUT MY EARS, she replied calmly and reasonably with an offer of help and sanity. So she wins all the prizes, as far as I’m concerned. And Karl Urban in a bow, obviously. (No seriously, that was our deal.)

Word count marathon, day 2

Starting word count: 248,678

Ending word count after revising Chapters 5 through 8, 27 through 29: 244,962

# words cut: 3,716

More progress, though not anywhere close to where I need to be by now. And I realized today that the there wll be a law of diminishing returns, in that my calculations assumed yesterday that I could sustain deleting an average of 625 words per chapter. The reality is that isn’t sustainable, something I realized when two of my chapters had hardly anything I could cut.

Then again, Chapters 1 through 28 had been pretty well picked over before I started this mad dash of revision; Cat has assiduously applied her editing expertise and kung-fu to all of those chapters, and then I’ve made additional edits to them as I incorporated her changes into the finished draft. Which means there actually is quite a bit that can be cut from the chapters that haven’t yet received that attention, just from that process. The problem, of course, is that it won’t be possible to perform that kind of editorial review before Friday.

Which…it’s my pitch paragraph that needs to be turned in by Friday, not my entire ms. BUT! I’ll need to include my word count with my submission, and even if it’s finalized, I’d really like to have that number much closer to 200,000 than it is right now. On the other hand, I don’t want to get too frenzied or I’m liable to either A) cut injudiciously, or B) add errors instead of removing them. Because the fact remains that I’m merely submitting my pitch for critique and it won’t elicit anything more than that feedback. I’m essentially trying to get ready for a wedding when the guy (or in this case, girl) hasn’t even proposed!

I can’t help but be reminded of the J. Walter Weatherman “lessons” George Bluth taught his kids on Arrested Development. Instead of “And THAT’S why you always leave a note!”, it would be “And THAT’S why you always have your manuscript ready for submission!”

Word count marathon, day 1

From earlier this evening (Friday…I realize that it’s now actually Saturday morning):

Starting word count: 251,218

Ending word count after revising Chapters 1 through 4: 248,678

# words cut: 2,540

There are 68 chapters in the book. If I can keep the same pace of cutting rougjly 2,500 words per 4 chapters (or 625 words per chapter, for the math challenged in the audience), I’ll be able to trim 42,500 words from my manuscript. I’d still need to trim another 10,000 words (roughly) to reach my goal, but this suddenly doesn’t seem as Sisyphean as it did. I’m still going to have to cut out a sizeable piece of the narrative somewhere to get that 10,000 word chunk, but that’s looking a lot more attractive than the 4 or 5 chunks I though I was going to have to get rid of before today. Or yesterday. Whatever.

I’m going to have to pick up the pace this weekend, though, if I’m going to get through this. And I’m still working on my pitch paragraph, so I have some a big task ahead of me.

a little lesson on being prepared

I am on a Surprise!Writer’s Retreat. Well, technically it’s not a retreat since I’m at home, but I’ve taken today and tomorrow off work, and my home is pretty fabulous so it could be considered a retreat. The Surprise! part is because I wasn’t actually planning to do it until Monday.

The catalyst was an announcement by agent Kristen Nelson last week that she would be hosting a webinar titled “How to Write and Sell Fantasy and Science Fiction Novels”, a 90 minute pitch and query workshop through Writers’ Digest geared specifically toward science fiction and fantasy novels. Not only is the topic exactly what I need, Agent Kristen is my dream agent. I’ve been following her blog for years and if I were so lucky to get representation by her or her colleague, Sara Megibow, it would seriously be almost as good as getting published. (They focus on women authors! And in more than just the usual “women’s fiction” genres! And they love sf&f! And they’re specifically seeking more sf&f to represent! I mean really.) The kicker of the whole thing? The webinar package includes the opportunity to send my pitch paragraph to Kristen/Sara for critique! (And maybe resulting in a request for sample pages…but I dare not hope….)

The webinar was scheduled for the middle of the morning today, which would require taking some time off work; a no-brainer, but I was thinking maybe I should take the whole day off. And then I started thinking maybe I should take tomorrow off, too, and give myself the kind of time to write I haven’t had in awhile. But there’s a lot on my plate at work and being gone for two days on such short notice isn’t something I could take lightly.

Monday, however, I decided to go ahead. It would mean scrambling to get some things done that I absolutely needed to for work, but I could do it. And so I did.

So I’ve just finished the webinar a little bit ago, and it was so, so worth it. Some of the information was what I’d already learned about how to write a pitch paragraph and the dos and don’ts of queries. Even so, having it presented by an agent in a discussion format helped clarify the ins and outs considerably. And I did learn several new things.

The biggest: that the plot catalyst I’d identified, which is what you use to build your pitch around, wasn’t quite the right plot point. That I had the right sequence identified, but the real catalyst is just a bit later in that sequence than I initially identified. That revelation alone was worth the price of admission.

In other, not so great news: I got confirmation that my worries about the word count are well-founded. I have to really trim to get my foot in the door. I’m at a loss there, but it simply has to be done so I’ll have to figure it out.

Which brings me to my lesson for today: be prepared. I have until the end of the day next Friday to submit my pitch paragraph. My favorite literary agency has just offered their advice on how to nail a query, and I have the opportunity to get their critique. I get to, in essence, pitch my book to them. If it’s good enough, it may prompt them to request further submission of my first 30 pages. This agency has a reputation for representing female authors across many genres. Very successfully. They have specifically said they are looking to expand their sf&f portfolio, an announcement agencies don’t make very often, and certainly not for those genres. I have a finished manuscript for an epic fantasy with a strong female protagonist.

But.

Although my manuscript is finished, the final pass isn’t. (Not for lack of desire, but because life has happened in the 4 months since I was last able to work on it.) It’s been revised many, many times, but this final pass has been incredibly helpful in tightening it up further. And I’ve been aware of the word count issue but stalled on where I can realistically make the big trims that need to happen.

So even though neither of these things will prevent me from submitting my pitch paragraph for critique, I’d be in an even better position than I already am if I had those two things done.

I will be spending the next eight days on my pitch, as well as taking a close, hard look at what I could trim to get the story down by at least 20%. (As I’ve said before, not just for the sake of cutting things out, but to make the story tighter.) I’m excited and determined. Wish me luck.

Progress, word count, and a sign that I may have a brain tumor

An extended weekend coast getaway and I have made some middling progress on Book 2. Gray skies and sea and a cozy cabin will do that to a girl, especially a writerly sort of girl, which I am. God bless the Oregon coast and all its inspirational glory.

Word count for today: 3,274

The day isn’t over yet — I expect I’ll be adding more tonight, after I’ve had a bit of supper — and I got a late start. But as word counts go, it’s pretty sad, considering I regularly bust out 10,000 words or more at a go when I’m more on my game. Unfortunately, I haven’t been on my game in quite some time, a state I don’t quite know what to do with, frankly, and I’m grateful at this point for any word count at all. I may in fact have to start regular word count posts as a means to keep the momentum, at least until I get this train back on track.

And speaking of trains, and tracks jumped thereof…three separate times today, I wrote “thrown” when I meant “throne”, and was in fact thinking “throne”. A simple mistake, you might think, but you would be wrong.

I’ve never had a problem with homonyms, homophones, or homographs, other than the occasional mistake caused by a momentary brain lapse. I have no trouble differentiating the correct usage of there/they’re/their, its/it’s, red/read/read/reed, nor even words that are not technically homonyms/phones/graphs, such as accept/except or insure/ensure. And in fact I have never really had a problem with these vagaries of our delightful language, though I certainly understand the confusion they cause others.

Never, that is, until recently. In the last few years, I’ve noticed an alarming problem that has me a bit freaked out. Have I suddenly begun confusing there/they’re/their, the bane of most English users? Do I now struggle with whether it’s it’s or its? Am I now conflicted about whether the word I want is accept or except? No, no, and no. Again, except for the occasional brain lapse, these give me no trouble.

But recently, I have found myself typing words that are different than the ones in my head, homophones that I’ve never before struggled with and in many cases, didn’t even think about as being homphones until I found myself typing the wrong word all of a sudden. Like today’s repeated use of “thrown” when I meant “throne”. It wouldn’t have been a homophone pair I ever would’ve thought of if I were listing them, and yet my brain made the connection and took it upon itself to order my fingers to make the substition. Even as I was typing the word, I was thinking “throne”, yet I typed “thrown”. And even after I was aware of it, I kept doing it.

It happens in blog posts, emails, texting, book writing…I’m doing it frequently, discovering homophones that never before occurred to me. It wasn’t that I didn’t recognize before that the word I’d intended had a homophone equivalent, but simply that they were never connected together for me before unless I was specifically trying to think of homophones. We’re not talking about common, everyday mix-ups here. And it’s happened to me so often now that I’ve lost track of all the different pairs that’ve popped up, and I’m constantly discovering new ones (thrown/throne is my new one today).

Other homophone mix-ups I’ve made since this whole problem began:  roil/royal, bawled/bald, sordid/sorted, brood/brewed, wrapped/rapt, nose/knows (this one happens to me often now), righting/writing(!), chews/choose, sewn/sown, rigger/rigor, praise/preys, coulee/coolly, wheeled/wield. Those are just the ones I can remember at this moment, far from a complete list.

It’s got me so freaked out that the day that I substituted “eyed” for “I’d”, I googled demon possession and brain tumor pathology. Because seriously! How is this not a sign of something being majorly frakked in my noggin?? My brain is melting together, you guys! The orderliness of my previously awesome cerebral cortex is breaking down into chaos!

I have an alternative theory that my synethesia is spreading…that in addition to my spatial-sequence synesthesia*, where my brain has made connections between the flow of time and the three-dimensional world, my brain is now forming connections between words that have similarities. This would be a far cooler explanation than a brain tumor, and it’s the only reason I haven’t fled to the nearest neurologist’s office for every expensive brain scan available.

Or it could just be that I’m getting old and losing a bit of my mental faculties. But I think I’ll stick with the synesthesia theory.

*(For those new to the show, yes, I have spatial-sequence synesthesia, which that link up there explains very succintly:  “In spatial-sequence, or number form synesthesia, numbers, months of the year, and/or days of the week elicit precise locations in space (for example, 1980 may be “farther away” than 1990), or may have a (three-dimensional) view of a year as a map (clockwise or counterclockwise).” My synethesia is strongest in relation to time, but I experience it with all number forms (hence the number form link). And that is the cool fact about me for today.)

If these were dollars, it wouldn't be a problem

I posted awhile back about my concerns about the length of Matashara, and how its 250,000 word count might negatively impact my chances of getting a foot in the door with an agent and thus, negatively impacting my chances of getting published. I’ve had it in my mind that I need to do some serious cutting, with a goal of trimming it down to a tight 200,000 words.

So here I am, a quarter of the chapters edited, and not only is my word count not dropping, it’s actually gone up. By about 2,000 words. Oy.

I said before that I’m not going to trim anything just for the sake of trimming it. And I have been trimming things — a word here, a phrase there, an unnecessary sentence. But those edits aren’t going to drop 50,000 words, and some of the editing has necessitated adding narrative to make things clearer. Hence the net increase.

I have an idea that the section I’m coming up on can stand some judicious editing of plot, so we’ll see how far down it gets me once I’ve worked my way through it. Even if I removed the entire section — roughly 10 chapters — it still wouldn’t trim 50,000 words, and I’m obviously not going to do that anyway. There are two other sections I think I can do some copious trimming, as well, but they’re going to be trickier, and I’m not confident that the end result is going to necessarily lessen the word count when it’s all said and done.

So it may just be that I’m going to have to steel myself for that crazy high word count showing up on the upper right corner of my ms, and hoping for the best. But what I’m more afraid of than that crazy high word count is that it really does need some serious trimming, and that I’m not able to see it, not able to identify just where those cuts can and should be made. I suppose that’s why god invented editors, but if I can’t identify where the story can stand to be tightened up, then does that mean I’m not yet ready for prime time?

Novel length

I’m working on edits, and in the back of my mind, thinking about the overall word count. Reading all kinds of industry blogs, you learn what an “acceptable” word count is — 90,000 to 150,000, roughly, depending on the type of book or genre. Romance is generally at the low end or shorter, urban/paranormal fantasy more toward the middle, historical fiction toward the end of that range. Literary fiction is somewhere in the middle. Epic fantasy is at the higher end, and often surpasses it.

Keeping in mind that 75,000 is roughly a 200 page book, when you get up toward 150,000 words, then you’ve got a meatier book on (or in?) your hands. You start moving past that, you begin to enter BFB territory: Big Fucking Brick. Which is why epic fantasy is sometimes called brick fantasy. Or doorstop fantasy.

Well, mine comes in just under 250,000 words, so it’s not just a brick, it’s a cement block. True, it’s epic fantasy, but I’m concerned about that word count, not gonna lie. Which isn’t to say I’m going to start cutting things just to cut them, but I’m trying to be judiciously ruthless as I work through drafts, seeing if there’s anything I can tighten further, or shorten, or remove entirely.

Short of cutting out entire plot lines, however, I don’t see it getting down to, say 200,000. I’ve read that agents/editors won’t reject an ms out of hand due to a high word count, that if it grabs them from the beginning then they’ll make it work (though it’ll no doubt mean some painful cutting in the editing stage), but I admit I’m nervous about that big number that’ll appear in my query letter and the top right corner of my ms. Querying is hard enough as it is, as is getting your ms noticed in the pile of submittals and slush.

There’s not a whole lot I can do about it, other than to make the story the very best I possibly can, work hard on writing an outstanding query, and try to make myself shine enough for a potential agent to look past that scary number and keep reading.