A writer's life: rewrites

I'm reading a draft of a book I wrote. The Worlds is the first volume of a sci-fi trilogy, of which I've written the first two books. My job this year is get the book into shape so I can publish it. Okay, that's the background.

As I read The Worlds, I'm surprised to see a radical difference between the main body of the book, which I wrote three years ago, and sections that I wrote last year. The new sections are way better than the original draft. It seems I'll have to rewrite most of the book. That's fine because after so many months of editing Xmas Carol, I have a hunger to write new things. Let me at it.

It's stormy today in New York. You know what that means: perfect reading weather. I know what I'll be doing for the rest of the day.

Word counts for novels

I keep reading posts in writing forums where the the writer is fretting about their manuscript nearing 100,000 words. They seem to think there's a line at 100k that you must not go beyond under any circumstances -- and that 80,000 words is ideal for a novel. What planet are these people living on? And they say this line in the sand is drawn by potential book publishers. What?

I suspect all these people are from the new non-reading public even though they're allegedly writers. And perhaps publishers aim only for that market these days, thinking there are no real readers left.

Personally, I'm thrilled when a book that I'm enjoying goes on and on, and I've read many novels that were over 1,000 pages. In case you're not familiar with word counts, that's a hell of a lot more than 100,000 words -- more like a million or more. Length is something a writer shouldn't think about. If it's good, it's good. What does size have to do with it?

It's strange. I guess in the new YA (young adult) market, which seems to be the one most writers aim for these days, they like short books. You don't want to stress those readers' brains. But this is nonsense talk. Xmas Carol is well over 200,000 words -- and I don't think it's a long book at all. If I picked it up, I'd finish it in two or three days. That's too long?

A book that's only 80,000 or 90,000 words is a novella, the way I see it. And novellas suck. What's your opinion? Aren't you upset when a good book ends? You want it to go on forever, right? How could it be otherwise?

Meanwhile, back at the salt mines

Turda salt mine, Romania.

In the earliest days of this blog, I wrote a few posts that outlined my approach to novel-writing. I'm not the sort to heed other people's advice so I invented the process from whole cloth.

I had questions and I questioned everything. First person or third person? Must I include an antagonist? How would I avoid the boring pitfalls most novels fall into (like sci-fi novels including evil government agents in every single story)? How should I write dialogue? And how the heck do you structure a scene? It was all new to me. When I started writing, I didn't know a thing.