by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
I’ve reached something of a milestone — I’ve completed something akin to a pretty decent first act of a first draft of an actual, honest-to-God thriller novel in the tradition of Stieg Larsson.
This is the point where I sheepishly admit that I have about 50 scenes for this first act, which is way too long if each scene is about 1,000 words. Your novel is supposed to be 25% first act 50% second act and 25% third act. If I held to that, I would now be looking at a novel with around 200,000 words.
There are a few solutions, given that the sweetspot for someone in my situation is 80,000 to 120,000 words. One is, the individual scenes aren’t all 1,000 words, but only average 1,000 words. The other is, the rest of the novel isn’t strictly setup the way it’s “supposed” to be and so it’s more like 40%, 40%, 20%. That’s not too bad. But right now, I’m looking at just about 80 scenes for the Second Act so…I got a problem.
Another way to look at this is, I’m just working on a first draft. I can always hack away at things when I work on the second draft. I’d rather have too much than too little copy going into the second draft so, lulz.
As I keep saying, this is the first novel in what is planned to be a five novel (3 + 2) series, with the last two novels hopefully starting an open ended series with my own interpolation of the Lisbeth Salander trope.
At least, that’s the dream.
But I still have a huge amount of work to do. As such, I’ve decided to switch gears for about a week and concentrate on doing a lot of the reading that I’ve not done since I started this project. The second act is where the police procedural element of the novel comes to the fore and I have to figure out how to at least not to embarrass myself.
So, throwing myself into reading it is. There is so much reading I have neglected. Giving myself a sold week of just reading should not only inform things going forward but also refresh me so when I throw myself back into the novel I’ll see things with clear eyes again.
It sure would help if I had a muse, or a girlfriend or a wife.
