The best laid plans of mice and men, eh? At least I’m still ahead.
I’m hitting a rough patch in the novel. The story jumps ten years ahead within a matter of pages, and we get the real protagonist. (The woman we see in the excerpt is important, but doesn’t make the hard decisions in the story.) It feels almost like starting the novel up again and I worry about another pause moment like at the start.
Good thing I have a buffer, right? Heh heh heh.
What’s really bothering me is how long the story is looking. By 10,000 words I’m still on the first chapter. 1/5 the novel on what amounts to the prologue.
What I’ve read recently about first novels is that books in the 160k + range are a hard sell, that something around hey there 50k to the unheard of heights of 80k. I know what the book’s halfway mark (ish) is, or at least should be… and I think it should arrive at 80k at this rate.
Hi ho.
So I’ve thought about pruning off and on for the past few days. While I want to keep that opening (it kind of sings), there’s some business after that which wouldn’t be missed if snipped. Then there’s a bit after that which seems important (dealing with the blizzard), then a whole chunk of change that might be liquidated with prejudice.
Sadly, that last bit is the part I’m working on now.
Oh well.
Writing first. Rewriting second. Such a barbaric way of handling things, but that’s the way it must go, if I want to win this noncontest.
Tally ho!
[...] – Day 7 (I) 2009 November 7 by Cullen M. M. Waters As I feared, the writing wheels are spinning like mad, but are getting no traction. I know what I want to [...]