Byzantium's Shores: chronicling the misadventures of an overalls-clad hippie

Shortly before we moved from Syracuse, I finally finished the rough draft of my Arthurian fantasy novel, The Promised King, Book One: The Welcomer. I've been working on this novel, in one form or another, for a little more than six years. The current rough draft is actually the third draft I've generated in this story, but this is the one where the story's shape is finally the way I want it. The earliest version was my first real attempt at writing prose, and it showed as I succumbed to just about every possible "rookie mistake" that exists in writing: the first third was one gigantic infodump, akin to if The Lord of the Rings had started with "The Council of Elrond" and taken 150 pages to do it and complete with "As you know, Bob" bits of exposition that embarrass me to this day when I happen to re-read them.

(An "As you know, Bob" is when one character tells another character something that they both already know, purely for the benefit of the reader:

GANDALF: Ah, the ring. As you know, Frodo, your uncle Bilbo found it and took it from Gollum. (stands up, bangs head on ceiling) Ouch!

FRODO: Yes, Gandalf, I remember the ring. And as you know, Gandalf, we hobbits are really short and live in holes in the ground….

You get the idea. The problem, of course, is that people generally don't sit around telling each other things they already know. Outside the White House Press Corps, that is.)

In addition to all the extraneous infodumps, I also had a very large-scale subplot -- actually a parallel plot that was to have little to do with the main plot until the very end -- that simply didn't belong. So I excised it and saved that material in another place, for use in a later book.

Then, when I bought a new computer a year and a half ago, I found that half the original files had been corrupted -- so I had to actually re-type the entire thing. This actually made things better, because there were spots in the original narrative where I'd left notes to myself like "Flesh this out later" or "Make up the background for this". All that got tightened up and dealt with, particularly the backgrounds for one set of supporting characters.

So now, I'm onto the last set of revisions before this thing goes off to publishers. In the novel's current state, I have twenty-two chapters with a short epilogue. (No prologue. I was once ambivalent about prologues, but now I pretty much hate them.) The current word-count is just over 187,000 words, which translates to between 400 and 500 pages in a mass-market paperback, depending on the typeface and page-density. (Or, in other terms, it's just a bit shorter than Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.) I'm hoping to edit that total down by roughly 18,000 words for the final draft.

And then, it's on to The Promised King, Book Two: The Finest Deed, in which the story concludes. (Nope, no trilogy.) I already have an initial draft in longhand form, but I already know of at least four major changes I'm going to have to make to the story. But I'm hoping to take roughly another year to get that one done.

So proceeds my plan for world domination.