Tuesday, June 26, 2012

Manuscript Ahoy!

Since I'm gearing up to start editing it in July, I finally got around to printing out a copy of Princesses In SPACE!!! (not the actual title).

It's a proto-book! (2)


It's all I can do to resist the urge to plunge right into the book right now. I always enjoy doing my editing, even though I can be really brutal on my own work. After I finish one round of edits, I hope to have a few beta-readers give the thing a look-see (note to self: find beta-readers), and then one more round of edits (unless the consensus opinion of the beta-readers is that I've written the literary equivalent of Plan 9 From Outer Space, in which case I'll sit down and drink a lot of rum and have a good cry). Then it'll be off to a publisher or some such purveyor of fine literary items.

The manuscript is 443 pages long. I wrote it in individual chapter files, but in the end, I wound up copying and pasting all the chapters together into one really big file. Not sure why I'm bothering to tell you all that, but I tend to be interested in matters of process.

Anyway, next week, it's time to give my darlings a bit of a dust-up. I know, you're supposed to 'murder your darlings', and I may well do so. We'll see!

It's a proto-book! (1)


In other writing news, The Adventures of Lighthouse Boy (not the actual title) continues churning along, although my output there has not reached the consistent heights that I did whilst writing Princesses. I'm still feeling out my world and making up my backstory as I go, so this one's a bit tougher going. As of right now the book is just under 28000 words long (roughly 68 pages of a mass-market paperback), and I've had six days in the last month where I produced a goose egg for word count, which is...well, not great, but I'm averaging 600 words a day (bolstered by a couple of really good days).

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Congrats on your massive milestone - Stephen King was right: put it away for a couple weeks so when you look at it again, its only vaguely familiar. That will help build your nerve to chop the cute duckling heads off those little darlings.

Roger Owen Green said...

good luck.
When I edit, unless it's totally unclear, I find that less is better, FWIW.

teflonjedi said...

http://www.lulu.com/

I've been looking at these guys as potential publishers for years myself...might be worth checking out.

M. D. Jackson said...

Don't read it just yet. Savour it. Heft that weighty beast. doesn't it feel good?

Kal said...

I know what it feels like to look at that block of paper and then being terrified to start reading it. I know all four of my books are genius but I can't seem to make the time in my brain to start the editing process. I like the work more than the end product.