Oh man, I have been a bad little blogger lately. Between trying to survive the holidays, the evil day job, and trying frantically to finish up a WIP, I haven't had much time to do anything else.
In non-writing related news, I became a great aunt again right before Christmas. Baby MacKenzie is sweet and beautiful and the first female born into the Redford clan in 37 years. Needless to say, she's going to be receiving the royal diva treatment for quite some time.
On the writing front, I did get an email this morning from the fabulous Estefanie at Night Time Romance Reviews. Unfortunately, she's been really sick for a while ( Sending healing thoughts your way, Stef), but the equally fabulous and funny Veronica did a wonderful review of Taking Liberty. You can find it here, if you're interested.
Now onto the musing session of this blog. As I mentioned earlier, I've been busting my butt trying to get this WIP done. Thing is, I started this book with the idea that I'd keep it to a nice little novella. Say 25,000 thousand words or so. But in my typical fashion, midway through the book a plethora of plot ephiphanies started screaming at me. Use me! Use me! So I did. And I'm glad, because I truly think the new plot threads have added a lot more than mere word count to the book. So everything is hunky dory. Mostly. See, about a month ago I got this intriging story idea that'd work perfectly for an anthology I've had my eye on. Here's where the musing part comes in. How delusional am I in thinking I can actually stick to 25,000 words or less? During all the years I've been working at this writing gig, I've never once came in under 40,000 words on a book. Would I just be setting myself up for an inevitable fall trying to tailor the book for the anthology? Would I be better off forgetting the anthology and just writing the book without word count limitation? Or should I (gasp) actually try discipling myself for once?
In case you were wondering, yes, that was my head you just heard exploding.
Sigh.
As always, any advice, sympathy, and/or boxes of Godiva chocolate are most welcome.
2 comments:
Congrats on becoming a great aunt again!
My 2 cents...let the book go where it wants to go. It will be the better for it.
I used to think I could never write shorter than 100k, so I understand the feeling that 25k feels really short. It took me a bit to wrap my head around writing shorter, but I finally realized I could do it if I compress the time frame of the book, limit secondary characters, and make every scene work double or triple duty. Oh, and keep the plot focused on a direct path to the HEA (or HFN). Now that I have a feel for it, I really like it. And it's like the muse likes it too, because my plot ideas can be neatly contained under 30k. Of course, I always leave myself open to sequels... If that's cheating, then so be it. LOL
Oh, and if I could, I'd send over a box of Godiva chocolates, but they don't travel very well through the internet. The chocolates tend to melt and then they're not so yummy anymore. ;)
That is fabulous advice, Ava. And I totally agree. It's much better to let the book go in the direction it wants to go. With that in mind, I'm not going to even worry about word count. If it doesn't fit the framework for the anthology, so be it. Story first. Always.
Bummer about the chocolate. ;-) Guess I'll have to resort to looking for some left over Christmas candy. There's got to be some around here somewhere...
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