Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Various and sundry
We’re watching a Xena: Warrior Princess marathon on Logo, a network dedicated to gay viewers. I always knew there was something special about those Gabriele-Xena bath scenes. Hey, I was just looking for the soap.
Maureen is hosting a 72-er at Writer’s BBS. Kinda like the NFG 69-er, but with three more words. Click on over if you want to read; if you want to play, you’ll need to join Writer’s BBS, but hey, it’s free.
I finished my first read-through-and-edit on my novel, The Brakan Correspondent. It took a while — 651 single-spaced pages, and I can only get some decent editing time in on weekends. Now for the last step (I hope): I need to fix all the problems I’ve found on the first read-through. I’ll be losing scenes, adding others, patching plot holes, axing evil wases, and replacing as many lame speaker attributions as I can with action tags.
At the risk of sounding arrogant (of course, when has that ever bothered me?), I think this story is something special. I’m feeling confident an agent will pick this up and get it published. Will it make it into Paperback Writer’s 2% that sell more than 5000 copies? Hey, right now I’m high enough on it that I can see it pushing LaHaye’s Left Behind schlockfest off the shelves.
Ya gotta dream big.
D.
651 pages? 651 single-spaced pages? What’s that in words? 400,000 or so? That’s getting into Peter F Hamilton territory, and look what Aspect did to his Night’s Dawn trilogy (clue – how many books in a trilogy?) The good news is that it only takes a couple of copies to push a dozen lesser works off the shelf.
Current word count = 305,750
One of my bigger problems: I can see how to split it into two books, but not three.
Funny thing is, there’s not a heck of a lot of filler here. Really!
Great news, Doug!
Tsk, tsk, the girl in the Xena series is spelled Gabrielle, with two ll, not with one like my name. What were you thinking?
OK, I can guess what.
A 300K monster, wow. And isn’t there this first drafty Karakorum one, too, and full as big? Good luck.
I’m shocked, shocked Gabriele that you should know the proper way to spell Xena’s costar’s name. Have you been writing fan fiction?
As for Karakoram: it was a little over 100K words when I gave up on it. That baby sprawled like you wouldn’t believe — a product of inexperience, lack of discipline, etc. TBC is bad enough when it comes to multiplicity of story lines and characters; Karakoram was even worse. But thanks for asking.