On Writerly Things
Apr. 8th, 2010 10:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
For the first time in a while, Wonderful Husband and I have resumed taking classes. Specifically a dance class for the both of us Friday nights, and for me a writing class Wednesday nights. The latter met for the first time yesterday, and I think I'm rather going to enjoy it. It's going to be much more of a feedback/con-crit circle than an actual class, and from what we did last night I think it's very much going to help me.
Getting home from the class, I opened the file on my novel which has been sitting untouched for too long. Out of curiosity I pulled up the stats. Eighty thousand words! And out of double curiosity I pulled up the websites of a few publishers of the genre. One calls for 100K-130K words, but two others just say 80K+. O.O;; I thought I was much further off than that! Of course I still need to finish the thing and then edit/polish the heck out of it, but I have most of a finished novel sitting on my hard drive. So I've been spending part of this evening poking at the first chapter and trying to figure out what I can do to fix the crappy first five pages... which will be the ten (double-spaced, in a larger, broader font) that I will probably turn in to the class next week. Currently my thought for "how to fix this" is "delete most of it." May end up going with that.
Getting home from the class, I opened the file on my novel which has been sitting untouched for too long. Out of curiosity I pulled up the stats. Eighty thousand words! And out of double curiosity I pulled up the websites of a few publishers of the genre. One calls for 100K-130K words, but two others just say 80K+. O.O;; I thought I was much further off than that! Of course I still need to finish the thing and then edit/polish the heck out of it, but I have most of a finished novel sitting on my hard drive. So I've been spending part of this evening poking at the first chapter and trying to figure out what I can do to fix the crappy first five pages... which will be the ten (double-spaced, in a larger, broader font) that I will probably turn in to the class next week. Currently my thought for "how to fix this" is "delete most of it." May end up going with that.