megwrites

The basic question is this: is having a novel with a word count above 100,000 the absolute death of any hopes for publishing a work you may have?

It's come upon me that even with the massive editing I've been doing, that Revenant Blues is going to be a little on the hefty side.

I've taken out big spots of unnecessary dialog, characterization, description. I've even cut most of the ending part out and gotten straight to the big finale.

But. Still. This thing looks like it's going to come to 140,000 - maybe less if I go through again and go line by line and get rid of some of the prose-level flourishes I sometimes indulge in. I could maybe get this sucker down to somewhere in the 130,000-120,000 range. That's if I start wacking away like a weed whacker at everything.

But there is just no way to cut out 40,000 words without taking out chunks of the book that would leave it unable to function.

I've been carving this thing down to nothing but that which is absolutely relevant to the story. I've been cutting out favorite scenes and such - to no avail. The word count keeps staying high.

In one of the books I'm reading on agent-hunting and the like, there's a big emphasis on having a novel that's 100,000 words, and a lot of quotes given by agents to that effect.

But I also noticed that these agents didn't really work in the fantasy field, either. These were people from the literary, suspense, and romance neck of the woods.

So I need people who know. I need people who can give it to me straight. Help!

- I don't believe in Mary Sues. I just believe in bad authors. I came to terms with this after reading this little piece on pbackwriterfeed. You could make an awesome character or a terrible character out of any description given. It just depends on if you're that good or not.

- I mean, okay. A museum curator with a Jag and a big house and a dog and hybrid roses and gourmet dinners. She could be deeply in debt and the female James Bond with an Art History degree. How much would that rock? You could be all "Monet, not Manet" instead of "shaken not stirred". And the roses could be poison evil roses with extra pointy thorns designed to kill people and small animals who do business where they shouldn't.

- It's kind of not fair. James Bond gets to be a big, beautiful oversexed man-whore with way more credibility than he deserves but Money Penny stays that the office?

- Oh, hell no.

- Keep your *&&)^ing plotbunnies to yourself, brain.

- The quickest way to convince me that you're an idiot is to overuse ellipses (the "..."). Besides the dash is the new ellipsis. It's way cooler and literarily snobbier. Word to Emily Dickinson.

- I'm a bad grammar nazi, overall I believe grammar is only important in that it creates a universal system by which people can decipher what the hell you are trying to say. Otherwise it's all stylistic and that's also why I can't be part of a writer's group. My soul can't take another person handing out diatribes about grammar, and the next time anyone says the words "you shouldn't use semicolons in fiction" I'm gonna break out the zombies and LET THEM EAT YOUR EYEBALLS, BETCH.

- Did I mention I also hold ee cummings near and dear?

- Anyone who says that any word is not a word is an idiot. If you say it, use it grammatically, and it has an arbitrary meaning - then it's damn word. Firstly is a word. I will use it whenever I feel like it. You will be forced to understand exactly what I mean by it, because FIRSTLY is a word.

- I don't get the point in life of literary criticism. I want to. I went to school for four years as an English major. I still don't get it. I try to read lit journals and my eyes start glazing after about three paragraphs. It's all one big "blahedy blah blah" to me.

- I realized this after reading this review written by truepenny. Good points are made all around. Go read. Feel educated.

- As a great professor of mine said, "These books were never intended to be read in a set amount of time and then picked apart this way, and it's an author's nightmare that you have to." (paraphrase). So, basically, literary criticism is the fine art of using literature for something else than its intended purpose. It's like trying to critique a bunch of runway models on the basis of IQ. I'm sure some of them are quite intelligent, but that's not what they're there for. They're there to be *pretty*. So you evaluate them in terms of *prettiness*.

- Whenever I think about English academia, I miss the halcyon days of my history minor. Something about having actual facts and evidence to work with makes me all nostalgic. Dude, when you're working with literature, you can fake anything as long as you have proper footnotes and citations.

- I've toyed with creating my own style. You know, like Chicago Manual or MLA or something like that. Except my style wouldn't change every five minutes like MLA and would probably make more sense. Also, my style would contain the rules and guidelines for the use of all caps, using misspellings as a form of mockery and derision, and sentences that go like this: "IM IN UR ______, _____IN' UR ________." For example IM IN UR FRIDGE, EATIN UR FOODZ. It's important to know how to parse these things out.

- The more I research agents and publishers, the more I find that a cover letter for an agent/publisher and a cover letter for a job share a lot of similiarities. They seem to contain a pattern for answering these basic questions:

Who the hell are you?

What do you want?

Where did you find me?

Okay, what are you selling?

Give me one good reason I should give a damn?

Has anyone else given a damn?

If I do give a damn, where I can look you up?

Can you act like an adult even though chances are that I'm all out of damn to give?

Is there an SASE by which to expedite the process of telling you that nope, we're fresh out of damn?


- All in all, it's not an unreasonable position to take. The more I think about what agents/editors do, the more I sort of pity them. Imagine having to make your living by going through the Pit of Voles on a daily basis, trying to pick out the pieces which someone might bother to pay money for. It's a needle in a Mt. Everest of Crap. I'd start sending out form letters, too.

- Still, makes my stomach hurt sometimes, thinking about all this. Right now I'm the end stages of having a manuscript that I wouldn't be ashamed to show another human being. So I keep telling myself, hey, I'm on step #403 and this is all step #687, and to just keep my eye on the ball.

- But I'm also telling myself that if I don't keep an eye out, step #687 will come and slap me in the face.

- Still, I can't complain. I knew that I stood a 99.99999% of ending up in penniless, rejected obscurity with nothing to show for my life's ambition when I started this venture. Chances are good this will come to nothing, that I will turn out to be a failure, and that everything will go wrong. But I can't fathom doing anything else. So I'll do my best, and I'll shoot for the moon 'cause there's nothing else left and I can't turn back now - because I want this so bad that sometimes I physically ache, and because I've been sharpening this sword since I was a kid barely big enough to hold it. Time to start swinging.

- This took longer than I thought it would.