Slogging away at the novel.

[matt_doyle]

I am, I think, finally committed to The Hellion Prince as my next project; I have 27,000+ words written, in nonlinear, fragmentary scenes (I estimate at least 10k of these words will be cut eventually, but still).

This is a much bigger book than I thought it was.

Running In Her Veins, when all was said and done, tallied up at 91,723 words. That's not a very long novel, maybe 300 pages at most. I knew Hellion Prince would be longer - maybe half as long again, I estimated, a nice respectable 400-pager.

Even if I assume those 10k words of fluff are going to be cut... I'm not even ten percent done with the damned thing. Even if I were, 170,000 words is still Later Harry Potter Territory, and more than that... yikes.

Presuming I ever finish this, how the Hell will I sell it?

Comments

[kessie.livejournal.com]

From my years of haunting agent and publishing blogs, I've come to understand the general consensus is that most debut novels should be around 100,000 if they're adult genre fiction, or absolutely up to 120,000 for fantasy. (In the case of YA fantasy, which I'm working on now, the upper limit would be 80,000.) There is a certain amount of wiggle room in terms of word-count for later novels, but 170,000 words is... well, 170,000 words. I think that's longer than the average GRRM and lots of words = lots of money in printing costs.

So, yeah, I think you'll probably have to edit the hell out of it. There are always exceptions, of course, like Patrick Rothfuss, but the impression I've received is that it has to be really damn spectacular to be said exception, you know?

[matt_doyle]

Yeah, that was my thought. It's just frustrating, because I'd thought this was a shorter story - I knew the chain of events, but I hadn't thought they would need this kind of space to be told in. Part of it, of course, is that I'm very bad at transitions. Every transition scene in RIHV happened when a perspective character passed out or went to sleep, the whole thing from start to finish is about 40 hours worth of time... Hellion Prince is 8 months of politics, romance, and skulduggery.

[kessie.livejournal.com]

Honestly, right now I would worry about getting the thing finished and then freak out about the size. By the time the draft is finished, you might have no need for certain subplots or whatever that you can cut or recycle in something else.

The first draft of TWFF originally spanned a month--this draft spans about a ten days to two weeks. There's a day or two I skipped because nothing needed to be mentioned, or it could be mentioned in a paragraph or two. The major reason for cutting so much time was that everything needed to be tightened and the consequences needed to be upped a lot.

Granted, I just figured out how to convey information to other characters that my main character and the reader already knows, so I am clearly no expert in these things.

[capnflynn.livejournal.com]

Agreed. Finish first, then worry about selling. Maybe start working on selling RIHV to polish those skills while you write Hellion Prince?

So do you typically write non-linear-ish-ly? O__O Everyone's techniques are so different!

[matt_doyle]

No, I usually write start to finish; Hellion Prince has been baffling me in the way that it comes to me. The further I go, the closer to linear it gets, but that's not saying too much so far.

[pillow-of-doom.livejournal.com]

robert jordan, anyone?

[matt_doyle]

Ah, but when he sold The Eye of the World, he had a thirty-year career as a multi-genre solid-selling writer.