Actual Hope
Published on Feb 05 2010 | Filed under: Embraced by Darkness
I started this blog entry the night before last, after I had spent several hours looking for scfi-fi/fantasy places to be published and I still had part 4 of my book to go through. I felt good and I was so enthused that I named the blog post “Actual Hope” though I got nothing else written in it. I found eight places (mostly magazines) that pay and accept scfi-fi/fantasy stories. I’m excited about it and have already sent off one of my short stories for consideration. I have plans to work on four more and get those sent off as soon as possible. I’ll be so excited if just one of them gets accepted. What’s really neat is that most of them urge for novel excerpts so I’m already working on pulling some stories out of The Death of Eliana and I’m working on the same for Embraced by Darkness. For some reason all of this has made me feel pretty good. I’ve also bought some cheap back issues of most of the places; research is a must.
Meanwhile I also found seven different scfi-fi and fantasy publishing companies that accept unsolicited submissions. Woot! Though I know the reaction I’m probably going to get from all of them. “Your book’s too damn long. We can’t publish anything over 120 thousand words.” Still, knowing that those publishing houses are out there, looking for books like I want to write, and being willing to take unagented submissions is pretty fucking awesome.
And I have been working on my book. I said in the beginning of this post that the night before last I was down to Part 4 – the end of the book. If you can believe it, I’m feeling pretty good about how the whole thing is reading. There was some doubt throughout the beginning of the book and, of course, I need to work on those places. But, last night, I finished it.
I finished the first complete read-through after putting my book back together!
Without a doubt, the last half of my book is a better read than the first half. I’m hoping I can cut even more but as it stands the book is now down to 173,052 from 236,743 when I started this last push a few months ago. That’s sixty thousand words that I’ve managed to cut. My boyfriend has taken to teasing, “How much did you delete of all your hard work today? Did it go well?” And I’ll say, “Oh yeah, I just love slaughtering it!” But, the truth of the matter is, that I’m actually not deleting any real substance from the book. Any real writer will know that what I’m doing is just improving what’s already there.
I literally sit and think, “How can I say that in less words?”
The biggest hardship I ran into in this last read through is that, because Karalay’s story is shorter, things were happening for her way before they were spurred to happen for the other characters. I.E. Karalay was reacting to Osondrous becoming queen before she actually became queen. Now, I know a lot of books do that deliberately and there was a part of me that wanted to leave it because the book was so happy and organized as it was. But, I decided, that because of the scope and size of my book, I needed to help my readers out and keep my three characters as close to the same time line as I could. So I had to change my method in Part 1 of the book.
If you’ve been keeping up with my blog posts than you know that I decided to break the book into four parts and omit chapters all together. In each part of the book I ended up going from Osondrous to Karalay to Jezaline to Osondrous to Karalay to Jezaline and then moved on to the next part. But because of Karalay’s shorter story and the fact that she HAD to end my book and the fact that she was the main character in my Epilogue I decided to pull half of her story out of Part 1 and move all of her story down. So Part 1 is now going from Osondrous to Jezaline to Osondrous to Karalay to Jezaline and then moving on to Part 2. See diagram. None of the other Parts have changed but I feel this was necessary and the fact of the matter is, no one reading the book is going to care or notice.
I want to cut more.
It’s painful and it’s true. I need to cut more and I want to cut more. There are two places in the book I hope I can slice more of it out, maybe not more than a few thousand words but if I can get the book down into the hundred and sixty thousand word area I think it will look better. Really anything shorter than it is now will look better to publishers.
But I’m not going to start cutting rashly. I’m going to read through it, one more time, and cut as I go. I hate to say it, and it does pain me quite a bit, but the truth of the matter is the places I’m thinking of cutting are out of Jezaline and Karalay’s stories which is pretty frustrating because Osondrous has the most words in the book. But, as I’m typing this I am thinking of a place in Osondrous’ story too that I noticed. When I read through it again I really hope I can cut them down without mercy and maybe “crosses fingers” even cut another ten thousand words out of the book.
