Making novels out of hash

[pjthompson]

Just for the sake of argument, and because I'd thought along these lines before, and because someone reminded me I'd been thinking along these lines, I went through the bloated corpse of my novel, Night Warrior, and cut out everything but the 6th century stuff. New word count: just short of 104k.

And it will be slightly more than that if I decide to smooth it out and make it a stand-alone, maybe another 10k(?), because I've got to write some bridging material because of the time leaps, and I've got to write in a chapter (at least) of late-in-the-book inspirations. So, maybe 115k?

Looks like I've got a goddamned historical fantasy on my hands, folks. And a historical fantasy sequel will have to be written if I decide to do such a foolish thing. Then I can incorporate the 20th c. stuff into a third novel, with more stuff written to good and properly end that timeline. But I probably won't do that unless and until I market this novel and sell it. I'm done with these bloody vampires until someone pays me not to be.

Or unless sufficient time passes and other projects get written for me to forget I ever made this vow.

Oh, and Night Warrior has a new name, courtesy of the lovely and talented merebrillante: The Making Blood.

Comments

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Cool title!

[pjthompson]

Thank you. After all the self-flagellation, Kim pointed out the obvious. Duh.

[merebrillante.livejournal.com]

Well, it was a dramatic moment in the story. And picking out titles is much easier than cutting novels to shreds. Here, let me fix you a margarita. A big one.

[pjthompson]

Ah, refreshing. In fact, I was too close to the material to come up with a viable alternative to Night Warrior although I'd been trying to do that for the better part of the year. So this was a very good thing.

[kimberlychapman.livejournal.com]

Big cuts like that are hard. I tried to cut out everything of my monster first Colony book that wasn't absolutely directly related to its plot...no character development, no nookie, no foreshadowing to sequels, no political commentary, nothing. It was still over 300k words.

So I applaud your effort! It's *hard*!

And the new title is better insofar as it is more original. Night Warrior seems a bit commonplace.

[pjthompson]

Big cuts like that are hard.

Not yet. That was just file management: saving down a new file and cutting out the other 80k worth of stuff not related to the 6th c. Hard will come when I actually rework the material, and write the next book, then add onto the remaining 80k and turn that into yet another book. I'm not looking at all forward to it, and in fact may never do the last two. Whatever. It's too soon after finishing to say at this point. I'm exhausted by the very idea.

Night Warrior seems a bit commonplace.

Horribly commonplace, which is why I've wanted to change it for awhile.

[kimberlychapman.livejournal.com]

Well then I wish you luck on the hard part when you do do it.

What would be easier is if more publishers would publish big books. So many readers I know prefer chunky novels, but so few publishers want to risk on them due to paper costs.

I totally get that my book is huge, but ALL of my test readers (not all of whom were even people I knew because some were friends of friends) said they didn't feel like it was chunky or long at all. One even said she had trouble believing it was that many words, that it was over so fast because of the flow of the dialogue.

But try to convince a publisher? Nope. *sigh*

[pjthompson]

Well then I wish you luck on the hard part when you do do it.

Thanks! This is probably a more rational structure for the novel, but I wanted to try something difficult this time out. I succeeded. This novel with its three timelines wore me out, so maybe whatever I have to do to make it work won't be as bad in comparison. I'm hoping.