by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
All systems are go with this third draft, but for one thing — the first half of the novel may just be too long. If you just count scenes, it’s possible that I will be coming in at about 160,000 total words for the entire story and that’s just way, way, too long — that’s a Stieg Larsson length novel.
Stieg Larsson novels, like The Girl With Dragon Tattoo are known to be a bit long.
This will be my first novel and I’m shooting for about, at most 140,000 words. And, really, it should be 100,000 words. I just don’t know what I’m going to do. I have been working on this novel for way, way, way too long and it’s time to wrap things up.
I have three major fears going forward with this novel — someone will steal a creative march on me, AI will render all human art moot and The Fourth Turning will cause the collapse of civilization. Those possibilities are making me feel rather nervous and prompting me to move forward as fast as possible.
But, in a sense, because all of those fear are out of my control, all I can do is just sprint. For personal reasons, I’m going to put a little bit of a pause on writing until this Saturday afternoon and I hope to use the free time to think a lot and to cool down creatively — I was running hot a little bit.
My heroine looks like Nathalie Emmanuel as I write her.
I think once this little pause is over that I will move a lot faster. I do, however, have to accept that I probably need a backup plan. I need a back up novel that I can develop and write in case something out of my control happens and makes the main novel moot.
Hopefully, of course, that won’t happen.
