I'm a few days late with this post, but I did finish the complete rough draft of my fantasy novel, and wanted to say so officially, even though I'm already well into the rewrite. (Which is technically at least the 3rd draft, since I went back over every chapter at least once after I finished them initially.)
The last chapter definitely went the fastest, with the finish line in sight and motivation high, and when I look back on the months and nearly years of wasted time and screwing around... well, I don't, or I'd just vex over them and not get anything new done. I'm glad to have finished, but knowing how much work I've got to do rewriting Chapters 2-5 to get them up to the quality and interest of the much stronger last few chapters kept me from feeling like I'd really finished anything.
At any rate, first draft down, 8 chapters, 507,087 words, approximately 745 pages. Unfortunately, those are my working pages, which are single spaced, with wider margins, and far more lines per page than a normal book. For the sake of comparison I've got George R.R. Martin's
Feast of Crows (still haven't gotten to start reading it) sitting on my desk, and a quick count tells me it has 40 lines per page, with about 12 words per line (estimating, since some lines are just a few words, word length varies, etc), which would multiply out to 480 words per page. And 480 divided into 507,087 = 1056 pages. Martin's book, (UK hardcover version) is 684 pages, not including various lengthy appendices.
Writing is not a length contest, but these figures give a fair idea of the size of things. (And you know how men are about size.) I'm actually somewhat encouraged by this page count, since it means I only need to cut a third to be in reasonable fantasy novel size at 700ish pages. If you've been reading this blog long enough to remember my worries about the book turning into a trilogy all by itself, back when chapter 2 alone ran 170k words, you can imagine my relief.
After the early bloat (which continued through chapters 3 and 4) I got the plot more on track, I did away with a number of planned side quests that weren't essential to the story, and I'm pretty happy with the pace and events in chapters 5-8. One's not bad either, but 2-4 are another matter; one I'm going to be tackling in the next couple of weeks.
There's more to do than just cutting length, of course. Malaya identified a number of structural problems, and a few of the plot twists I revealed in the last chapter needed to be better foreshadowed and developed in advance, for them to have the sort of payoff I want them to have. Characters need to interact somewhat differently early on, I need to put in more cuts between different narrators, and so forth. But it's definitely not undoable, and I'm actually pretty eager to get going on it, and not just for potential financial reasons, either.
Labels: the fantasy novel
