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swivel

A Moment of Panic

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swivel
, May 30th, 2009 at 04:48 PM (499 Views)
Much has been said about my research into Molly, but little about the writing process. If anything, it has been even more manic than my time spent with The Reader. Most of the rough draft of my narrative's first entry was written in a mere week. 76,000 words in seven 12-16 hour days.

If that sounds epic, consider that I have become so familiar with this story that it was just a matter of moving it from my brain to the computer. Plus, I have an interactive outline to work with--the documents on The Reader.

As soon as I had this draft prepared, I realized that a portion of the next events in Molly's life deserved to be included as well. This brought the word-count up to 85,000. With only 50 pages left to edit, the final count of my first manuscript figures to be right at 100,000 words. If I were setting out to write a science fiction novel, I couldn't have done any better.[More...]

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  1. Lazlo's Avatar
    I find it fascinating that there are set lengths for different genres. In my ignorance I would have thought a story would require the amount of words to tell it, no more, no less. Thanks to the glimpse into the real business of the publishing industry.
  2. swivel's Avatar
    I think most stories are more fluid than that, but I'm not positive. I know this: My story is probably a million words long, so I'm going to have to break it up over 9 books or so. Could I have told the entire story in a single book? Yeah... and skipped a LOT of entertaining shit. Could I stretch each book out to be twice the length? Absolutely, but the reader might get bored of the extra descriptors and inane dialog.

    As for publishers, most won't look at a work less than 85,000 words in length (even though the "official" length of a novel is 75,000). Some expect 100,000 and others won't look at anything OVER 120K-150K unless you have some prior publications or the work is just fan-fucking-tastic.

    I think the pub world is going to have a hard time adapting to new media because of these bizarro rules.

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