Monday, April 15, 2013

Writing 556 Pages

Writing sometimes comes easy. I have one story I wrote a few years ago that's 556 pages. I don't know why this story went on for so long, I guess it just had a lot to say.

After I send No Apologies out the door, Threshold of Midnight is up next. This 556 page moose does need some reworking but the story line is pretty solid. But who the heck will commit to read 556 pages? I think the size of this book might be a turn off so I'm thinking of breaking it in half and do a "Book One" and "Book Two" thing with it.

Which brings a whole lot of other issues in because I believe both books should be stand alone. I wouldn't want someone grabbing book two and spending 225 pages lost in space.

This is going to require some thinking. I have to let it settle in my brain a bit before I get started. But I still have to finish No Apologies and I have about 50 pages to go in the final draft. In this book I changed the story line about half way though so I had to rewrite it all the way through. I almost didn't. I just wanted to put No Apologies on the shelf and move on. The only thing that stopped me was that I liked my main character and wanted to breathe life into her. And I liked her quirky little dog.

Have you ever had a manuscript so long that you feared its marketability? What did you do?

1 comment:

Charles Gramlich said...

I've never come close to that length in anything I've written. Cold in the light was about 100,000 words and is the longest thing I've ever done,.

Last Day of NANOWRIMO --- Oh No!

 Where did the month go?  Certainly not on the page. I have an outline, some character sketches but mostly I have a lot of research notes.  ...