Speaking of the The Dead Mountain. I expect to be done with my chopping revision in a couple of weeks. Then I'm on going over my feedback and deciding what items I need to address and which I don't. Then it's editing and tightening. My first couple of chapters will go through a few more cycles though.

I'm hoping to be done and have made a synopsis by the end of the year.

Gud, I'm all for polishing until you think the *story* and the characters really sing, but I just wouldn't worry so much about a thousand words here or there. Speaking from experience, if an editor really falls in love with the book, s/he's going to want a chance to make suggestions for one, and s/he would also be able to give input on where to cut.

Plus? A book that's 50K words over length than one that's 3K over. There's a lot that can be done with pagination, type size, margins, etc., to make a book fall within the correct parameters for its price point, and that's the important thing. Books aren't a certain length because editors necessarily want them that way, but because books of a certain length are a certain size, and their price point is decided by paper costs, etc., for that size.

I have eased up on what I wanted to get down to. Originally it was 120k, then 122k, then 123k, but now I'm just shooting for under 125k.

I'm pretty much done with outright cutting now. I did also add a few things during this shrinking process because they felt like they needed adding. I think natural tightening will get me the last 2-3k to get under 125k total.

But I'm sure you're right, you know immeasurably more than I do. Now that I'm not at 153k, it's all going to be up to making it clean, fixing the problems found by feedback (at least the ones I think are legit), and hoping it manages to find someone who likes the style which is sort of epic fantasy with juiced up pacing.

As someone who used to acquire books, the most important thing for me was an excellent story with characters that felt true. I can fix your semi-colons and your pacing and some other mechanics, but none of that is important, even if it's perfect, if the story doesn't really grab me.

Well, I like the story. Though I think I'd like it even better if I didn't know everything that was going to happen.

Oh that's cute. You need your own spoiler font for your thoughts.

I totally do.

This is fun, find out who you write like:

[link]

For my novel I get Robert Foster Wallace (shrug) whoever he is. My short story gets William Gibson which is awesome.

Apparently that I Write Like tool is just a page hit generator that doesn't actually do anything in the background.

Hmm... I never thought it was something to be taken seriously, but there's a little thing on how it supposedly works (basically like a spam filter).

[link]

I did that a week or two ago. When I pasted a Lost recap into that, I got Joyce, which is way too apt for a page hit generator (not that I'm anything approaching Joyce, but the nature of recapping + the nature of Lost is very Joycian). When I pasted fic into it, I got Atwood (Buffy fic) and the guy who wrote Fight Club, whose name I'm too lazy to Google (VM fic). I understand Atwood got Stephen King, which tickles me.

eta the reason I really posted

This morning, I had to run to the store really early. I saw a man and he spawned a whole book in my head (not like that; he wasn't particularly hot or anything). I'm going to sleep now and am praying I get a Stephanie Meyer-esque dream of the whole damn story, because thinking is hard. Heck, learning enough about my Macbook to set up the document was hard enough.