Masks Edit

Well, I've gone through the bastard again.

122,000 words

615 pages in standard format (I write in Times but convert to Courier)

31 Chapters

I'm down a few thousand words even with a few additional scene and setting details.  This puppy is ready to roll.  Which means this is my last excuse.  I now have to do more research on Preditors and Editors and find the next agent I want to query.

Once again I'm very excited about working on the second novel in this universe, Signet.  But I'll be good and do that research first.

8509 words

This year it's a little easier to be on a work schedule and to write, at least so far. I couldn't write at all the first two days but I've caught up, thank goodness. I'm finding a huge advantage to revisiting Mayhem--I've missed these characters and writing with them is like visiting with best friends. Maybe that will make my draft even crappier than usual, but at least it's fun.

I'm writing it in a style waaaay different than normal. Not only is it in first person present, which I normally dislike, but I'm writing very short chapters, 3-10 pages. Writing this far outside my comfort zone for a Nano would probably fail, but with super-comfortable characters it's coming along okay. It's a great learning experience, and it keeps me on my toes without dragging me far out to sea in a riptide. If it stops working I'll probably revert to my normal third person, but I won't go editing back from the beginning to make it consistent until I've given it a chance to rest a couple of months. Then I can read it and decide if I want to keep the first person present or if I want to go back to normal view.
Normal View! NORMAL VIEW!!

That was for the MST3K fans out there.

The story so far--old friends reunite in grim circumstances, the pov character almost dies, and demons attack the fortress. I wonder what the next 42 pages will look like.

Eleven days and counting until my new computer. Just in time. The Finder crashed this morning. Time to back up Gypsy again before imminent catastrophic failure.

Then again, much like the Cascades, you never know what's going to be a full-blown top-exploding eruption and what's going to be another fluffy hiccup.

Pesky Word Count Stuff

I've hit 102,975 words on Masks. That's a good and a bad thing.

Good--I'm well over 80,000, the lower word count end for industry standard novel lengths.
Bad--Editors like to see shorter works out of first time authors. Less word count means fewer pages, fewer pages means less expensive to produce.
Good--In the fantasy genre in particular, readers prefer longer books. Some specifically shop for thick tomes, hoping for a good, long, lush read.
Bad--If I go over 125,000 it's often assumed (I'm told) that the plot will be loose and the prose will be purple and very wordy.

I'm hoping to come out of this under 125,000. If not, I'll consider pruning out entire chapters if need be. When I'm done with this thing I'll have a better idea of the pacing and which sections are strictly necessary (and which are not.) Right now I like all the chapters. Later on, I'm sure I'll be pretty ruthless and cull without feeling a need to hang on to this and that too much. Often, if there's an important plot point in a chapter, it can be shortened and moved to the prior or following chapter if you're careful. I'll try to be careful. Sometimes entire chapters are just window dressing, too, and if I have some of those, voila! my work is much easier.

BTW, 102,976 words happens in 499 pages. That works out to an average of about 206 words per page. That's pretty skinny for me. I blame dialogue, more frequent chapter breaks than I usually give myself (which blanks out half of a page at the beginning of each chapter) and the occasional bout of poetry.

More stats: I'm on Chapter Nineteen, which just got under way. Chapter Eighteen ends on page 492, averaging about 27 1/3 pages per chapter. Going from full word count, that averages about 5675 words per chapter. (This is where stats get interesting--the word count is about 45 words lower if you multiply 27 1/3 (average chapter page count) times 206 (average words per page.) Yes, I remembered to take away the word count for Chapter Nineteen because it's not finished. You can manipulate statistics a lot by rounding and changing the parameters slightly while still looking on the up and up. Beware statistics!

Moving on.

The super good news is that I'm here in July. That bodes well for finishing this baby this year (assuming I don't slack off) and maybe even finishing it sometime in August. I'm all for that--it looks like it'll need yet another polish before I can market it, so I'll need that extra time for reading through and making tweaks.

Gee, and I thought this was the final *final* edit prior to editing to an editor's specs. Just goes to show you, you never know when it comes to editing.