Friday, May 12, 2006

72500 words

When we last left off, the novel formerly known as "The Fixer" (now known only by an unpronunciable symbol) was at some 61000 words. Not shabby for 1939 (Raymond Chandler's first novel is almost exactly 60,000 words), but not enough to be a novel in today's day and age where 80,000 is the minimum and 120,000 isn't unknown.

Expanding and enhancing the ending and going back and fixing some of the consistency errors and adding more foreshadowing took that up to 64000 words. Still not enough.

But there is a whole chunk of the middle where things happen too quickly. Lots missing there to do the buildup to the end. So now I'm adding it. It looks like I'm going to get up to 80,000 pretty easily. The problem at that point is going to be to keep it there after I start seriously editing things. Less is more, and there's too much fat in several places where I fall in love with my dialogue and things stall.

Still don't have the foggiest bloody idea what the title of the thing is going to be. This is embarrassing.

And finally, I will state this for a fact: OpenOffice sucks the big one for doing serious text editing on a large text. As does any PC word processor. I'm tempted to export the whole damned thing back to plain text and import it back into Emacs again. I can do shit with good ole' 1980's-vintage Emacs that all these fancy high falutin' "word processors" can't even dream of. Oh sure, they're purdy. But they freakin' *SUCK* at the job of entering and editing and re-arranging text...

-- Badtux the Writer Penguin

2 comments:

  1. It could be a novella....

    ReplyDelete
  2. I find that Lotus WordPro works good because it allows you to tab chapters. Otherwise, I end up having to divide any large writing into multiple files. That sucks.

    ReplyDelete

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