I just finished a novel-length story — a little over 72K words — for the first time ever yesterday. All the revising and poking and second-guessing is done; I finished it, backed it up to a flash drive, wrote up a synopsis for the submission letter and sent it off to my publisher. Whose office is closed till Monday, but hey, my book is going to be one of the first e-mails they see that morning, right? I hope they have a great weekend with lots of excellent food and go back to work in a wonderful mood. 😀
It’s an urban fantasy set in the same world as “Chasing Fear” and “Candy Courage,” although there’s no overlap with any of the earlier characters. I have no idea how long the process takes for something of this length — either hearing back about acceptance [crossed fingers] or the editing and tweaking after — but I’m pretty sure at least part of me will be boinging all the way through it.
This was a great Thanksgiving for me, and I’m definitely thankful to have gotten this finished and submitted. 😀 I hope everyone else had a wonderful day too, and has lots of excellent leftovers.
Positive thoughts and crossed sets of virtual fingers happily accepted. [grin]
Angie
PS — am I the only one who gets all anal about chapter lengths? They don’t have to be exactly the same length (which is just as well ’cause they’re definitely not) but I like chapter lengths to be at least within spitting distance of one another. As a reader, if I’m going along and one chapter is twelve pages and the next is five and the one after that is nine, then fifteen, then three, then eleven… it feels jarring, as though the whole story is off-tempo. I can imagine a structural reason to do this, but if it’s not clearly an effect the writer was trying for, deliberately and for a purpose, then I get uncomfortable while reading, like listening to a song where the musician can’t keep the beat. So I spent most of the last day or two of my tweaking working on the lengths of a few chapters, trying to haul the worst of the outliers a bit closer to the bulk of the bell curve. Some came out better than others — I’m not about to pull necessary info out of a chapter just for length, or add six hundred words of pointless padding — but it’s better than it was and I kept going until I hit diminishing returns. Anyone else obsess over that sort of thing…?
