Long is a Four-Letter Word

Lately I've had word count on my mind. As a fantasy writer, I enjoy the luxury of longer length conventions, and so my current word count goal of 150,000 words doesn't seem that extreme. For another genre, yes, but for fantasy? Par for the course. Problem is, I'm currently at 36,000 words in my main document, and I still have four and a half chapters until the end of Part One.

There are four parts, and my chapters run between three and four thousand words apiece. So figure about 50,000 words for Part One. That's not so bad. Multiply that by four and you get 200,000. That's pushing it. That's really, really pushing it.

Parts Two and Four are, as it stands right now, going to be shorter than parts One and Three. I don't have complete outlines for the later parts, but if Part Four is roughly half the length of Part One, that puts me at somewhere between 175,000 and 180,000 words, which isn't that bad. For the kind of book I'm writing, it's pretty standard. I think.

Still, whether it's 175,000 or 200,000, that's a long book...and I'm a yet-unpublished writer. Getting a behemoth published as a first novel is going to be a lot more difficult than something a few thousand words shorter, and I've been hyper-aware of that for the past week or so. The more I work on this book, the more painfully obvious it is that it's not going to be a short adventure. This is going to be a paving slab of a book...and, if my ultimate dreams come true, the first in a series.

I desperately want to avoid splitting this first book into two or, gods forbid, three separate books, because--to me--this isn't a story that should be split like that. It would be messy and difficult to do. Splitting it between parts Two and Three would leave the mother of all cliffhangers (I say humbly), and splitting it elsewhere would make even less sense.

Doubts worm their way in: it will be hard to sell something so dense, the chances of a series are slim, you know how it goes. I'm trying hard to squash those doubts and boot them to the side, because I'm still writing. Thoughts about publishing are supposed to come later, after I have something finished and spit-shined. Hell, this might not even be the first book I get published. It might never get published. Who knows? If I'm honest with myself, this entire post smacks a little of getting the cart before the horse, but the issue is one constantly on my mind when I think about this damn book.

Right now I'm trying not to let it keep me from focusing on what's important: the story. My philosophy on things like this has always been to write the whole story first, and then go back and make changes or cuts or splits as needed. It's a challenge to stick to it sometimes, but my plan is to write out these concerns so they're pondered and set aside so I can get more work done.

So, I suppose, now that I've done that...it's time to finish chapter eleven.

'Til next time,
J.