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Wednesday, January 20, 2010

Circus Soul Heiress: Complete

Da da da!!! I clocked in roughly 3,000 words today so I could finish Circus Soul Heiress. My second novel is complete! Rough draft, yes, but it’s done! I’m ecstatic about it. I feel accomplished. It’s in dire need of revision, but IT’S DONE!

There are a few things I need to add with revision—namely description—but right now it doesn’t need the overhaul I’m dishing out to TOS as of tomorrow. (I’m sure my writing group will point out that I’m very, very wrong.) I knew CSH would be shorter than my first finished book, but it was a lot shorter than I had supposed, coming in at 91,000 words. (TOS finished at 169,000.) Revising will add some to it, but I’d rather have a book a little too short than a little too long. As I’ve learned from Brandon Sanderson, publishers don’t like printing gargantuan novels, especially for first-time publishees.

So, it’s finished. I’ll revise parts of it for class, but it won’t get a whole lot of my focus until after I rewrite TOS (which I plan to make shorter.) And I feel better about the ending of this book than the ending of TOS, which, at current, blows. (It will be MUCH better the second time around, promise.)

THE END (<--That’s what I got to write at the end of my book today!)

3 comments:

  1. Congrats! Finishing a novel is definitely an accomplishment, especially since it's your second. So now, you should be pumping them out one or two a year, right? :)

    My second novel was also significantly shorter than my first. Not sure what it is--maybe by the second one, you're willing to scale down from the epic scope in order to save time and effort. Or maybe you just realize that "epic" is not a synonym for "irrelevant details."

    Good luck with the edits! When do you start your third novel?

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  2. Thanks! One or two a year is the goal.

    I've started a planning notebook for book #3, but I don't plan to write it until the end of summer: next on the agenda is rewriting TOS, then revising CSH, then revising TOS, and then sending both out to alpha readers. THEN I start book three, ha.

    I like the "'Epic' is not a synonym for 'irrelevant details', ha."

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  3. Way to go, Charlie! My second novel was also a good bit shorter than my first (and better).
    Good luck with all your stories.

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