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Wait--what do I do now?
Apr. 12th, 2016 07:32 amMother of Souls went off to the beta-readers this past weekend and the first report back is, "I stayed up all night to finish it," which is a good sign. But I'm left in one of those odd, brief periods when I don't have an obvious "current writing project" to talk about. According to the hypothetical to-do list, the next thing up is starting the re-writes of the earlier Skinsinger stories. But what really needs my attention at the moment are a few projects that have been rudely shoved out of the way by the drive to edit MoS. Like the new Alpennia website. And lining up the next batch of Lesbian Historic Motif Project material.
(Started thinking ahead to the MoS release date in November and went to a bad place, so I deleted that. Let's try again.)
I've talked a lot about how each book has been different, simply because my process is evolving. Mother of Souls was the first book that didn't grow substantially in word-count during the initial revisions. The first editing pass, which was about plot continuity, alignment, and stripping out redundant material, added only 500 words to the overall count. The second editing pass, which was more about description and tone, added only another 1300 words. (It involved both adding and cutting, so that's just overall growth.) I'm still comfortably under 150K and unless the beta-readers find enormous chunks of story that need to be included, it's likely to stay that way.
This is interesting. As a comparison, the final version of Daughter of Mystery was 135K, and the final version of The Mystic Marriage was 166K. My impression based on reader feedback is that DoM "reads slower", in large part because the plot is less dense, while MM "reads fast" because more is happening. So MoS is just about midway in word count between the two, and (at least in my perception) the plot is even denser and more complex than MM. It will be interesting to see people's subjective opinions of the results of that. It will be even more interesting to see how long Floodtide wants to be. Based on the outline, FT currently has 17 chapter-type-plot-units. And based on the three existing books, evidently I'm settling into chapter-like objects around 4500 words long, which is the average for both MM and Mos, although DoM averaged out at 2200 words. So if FT is more like DoM, that calculates out to 37,400 -- technically within novella length. If it's more like the later two, that calculates out to 76,500. This is actually a bit of a relief since my goal is to aim it at the YA model (and believe me, that's going to involve a big learning curve), and those numbers fall within the "typical suggested range" even at the upper end.
Not that numbers are the only relevant thing, but they're a measurable thing.
And to close, the Strange and Random Happenstance blog is doing a Regency Magic series currently and featured a bio and interview with me last Friday. As usual, my books intersect the core concept somewhat at an angle, so it will be interesting to see what readers who are looking for "Regency magic" think of Alpennia. But if you like Alpennia, you're likely to find some other authors there that you might enjoy.
(Started thinking ahead to the MoS release date in November and went to a bad place, so I deleted that. Let's try again.)
I've talked a lot about how each book has been different, simply because my process is evolving. Mother of Souls was the first book that didn't grow substantially in word-count during the initial revisions. The first editing pass, which was about plot continuity, alignment, and stripping out redundant material, added only 500 words to the overall count. The second editing pass, which was more about description and tone, added only another 1300 words. (It involved both adding and cutting, so that's just overall growth.) I'm still comfortably under 150K and unless the beta-readers find enormous chunks of story that need to be included, it's likely to stay that way.
This is interesting. As a comparison, the final version of Daughter of Mystery was 135K, and the final version of The Mystic Marriage was 166K. My impression based on reader feedback is that DoM "reads slower", in large part because the plot is less dense, while MM "reads fast" because more is happening. So MoS is just about midway in word count between the two, and (at least in my perception) the plot is even denser and more complex than MM. It will be interesting to see people's subjective opinions of the results of that. It will be even more interesting to see how long Floodtide wants to be. Based on the outline, FT currently has 17 chapter-type-plot-units. And based on the three existing books, evidently I'm settling into chapter-like objects around 4500 words long, which is the average for both MM and Mos, although DoM averaged out at 2200 words. So if FT is more like DoM, that calculates out to 37,400 -- technically within novella length. If it's more like the later two, that calculates out to 76,500. This is actually a bit of a relief since my goal is to aim it at the YA model (and believe me, that's going to involve a big learning curve), and those numbers fall within the "typical suggested range" even at the upper end.
Not that numbers are the only relevant thing, but they're a measurable thing.
And to close, the Strange and Random Happenstance blog is doing a Regency Magic series currently and featured a bio and interview with me last Friday. As usual, my books intersect the core concept somewhat at an angle, so it will be interesting to see what readers who are looking for "Regency magic" think of Alpennia. But if you like Alpennia, you're likely to find some other authors there that you might enjoy.
