3,084/15,000 words for December.
Yay!
I've been pecking away at this scene for the past few days, and I finally finished it. I'm through Act I of my heroine's story!
Yay!
But...
It's 28,000 words. That's too long. I knew it was too long while I was writing it (especially since I'll have at least 20,000 words worth of scenes from the hero's POV to cram in there once I'm done with heroine's story), but I just stuck my head in the sand and kept merrily typing away, whilst chirping to myself, "Well, it'll just have to be a long book!" Nothing wrong with long books, right? Some of my best friends are long books.
But...
I've been looking at publishing info online, and according to my research exactly 0% of agents want to see a novel from a first-time author that's more than 120,000 words. The current projected length of TN is 132,000 words.
Crap.
So I've taken a deep breath and set an iron-clad limit of 115,000 words for the entire book, which leaves me 95,000 for the heroine's POV, which breaks down to 23,750 for Acts I and III, and 47,500 for Act II.
Which means Act I is currently bloated with approximately 4,250 extra words.
Crap.
Now, I'm not going to be a fanatic about this whole three-act structure thing. If Act I is a tad long and the others are a tad short, I'm at peace with that. But clearly some words need to go. So I'm moving forward into Act II, working toward the goal of 15,000 words edited this month, AND setting an additional goal of ripping 3,000 words out of Act I .
Yay?
Don't freak out! A good revision will cut 20% of the book at least--if it doesn't, you're probably doing something wrong.
ReplyDeleteI did cut a lot this revision, but I think I let myself get too attached some stuff I don't really need. Some of the scenes near the beginning are based on the earliest work I did on the novel, and it's hard to let them go. I wasn't ruthless enough!
ReplyDeleteKill your darlings, that's what they say. But what to cut and how much to cut are two separate questions. Maybe I'm just coming from the point of view of someone who can't do any self editing as I go along. But then, I'm bad at editing in general--I lean on a lot of help for that part.
ReplyDelete