The numbers thus far

[desperance]

Lawks. I've finished editing/redrafting/revising/rewriting (however you like to look at it; I think editing is probably closest) the first three of four parts to "River of the World", and thus far I have cut 27,304 words out of 110,001. Which, your arithmetical minds will tell you, is damn' near a quarter. To be precise, it's 24.8%.

Sheesh. Either it was deeply seriously flabby before, or I have been hacking away good sweet flesh just to get the pagecount down, and the residue will be bone-bare and unlovely. Who can tell?

I still have the longest section to go, another 80,000 words, more or less, and I expect to find fewer to cut. Indeed, so many have gone already, I've almost lost my incisive impetus: as though I've done the tough-love thing, and can give the little darling some leeway now. Tut. Discipline endures. See discipline endure...

Comments

[samarcand.livejournal.com]

Does this mean that you can have it published like Gaiman has done with his novels and Stephen King did with The Stand as 'The Author's Preferred Text'? (Although, admittedly, those things are meant to end up longer...)

[davidbarnett.livejournal.com]

You evidently enjoy the editing process. I detest it. Possibly because the day job's all about editing (to varying degrees), possibly because despite being fully aware of the "kill your babies" maxim, it really hurts to excise stuff that I've sweated over...

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

Excelsior! Onward and upward!

[markdeniz.livejournal.com]

I just found your journal through the white list and decided to add you to my flist. Check out the news on our Horror anthology as it looks like it may interest you.

*grins*

[samarcand.livejournal.com]

*attempts to exorcise the ghost of Stan Lee from shewhomust*

[samarcand.livejournal.com]

Actually, Chaz, something I've never been able to work out - to how many actual published pages (roughly, I know it depends on the font) does your 82697 words actually equate?

I've done my 61000 odd words (including some which may or may not be easily spoken) and that's 192 or 194 pages (depending on which PC I'm using at the time) of double-spaced A4 but I don't know how thick this actually is in terms of shelf space...

And, oh yeah, do hardback and paperback page counts differ?

[davidbarnett.livejournal.com]

My first published novel was roughly 83,000 words and that made 300 pages paperback, but it was an odd format (larger than average), but the type was pretty unusual, too. So that's probably no guide at all.

[devonellington.livejournal.com]

It will never be unlovely, Chaz. This is your writing we're talking about.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

I just ran the numbers on 'Bridge of Dreams', and they are these:

Text: 170,000 words
MS pages: 488
Published pages: 409

You do the sums. What interests me is that I'm about to produce a sequel significantly shorter than its forebear. I hadn't realised the final version of 'Bridge' was that long. It did get longer during the rewrites, I remember that, but I thought it had come in around 150K. How wrong I was. Dear me.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

It fits me like a glove; I have the soul of a copy-editor (pedantic and obsessive, ever in pursuit of a lost iota subscript). I'd rather not be doing it under pressure, as I am, but that's universal; and by the time the whole editorial process is finished and proofs checked, I'll be sick to death of the text, but yup, the process suits me. Anyone who can spend ten minutes balancing 'but' against 'though', and then shriek with glee as he types 'yet'...

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Awww...

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Nay, never! They did this to 'The Stand', as you say, and to Heinlein's 'Stranger in a Strange Land', both books I was very fond of at the time, and I leaped on these new engorged versions with glee, and never made it to the end of either one of them, and haven't read even the original versions since.

It was partly that I just found them overlong, but more than that, they were no longer the books I knew. I'm terribly conservative that way; if I'm rereading, I want to be rereading the same text, not bits I recognise and bits I don't. It's like translations: I have a new copy of 'The Count of Monte Cristo', a book I adore, and I can't read this because it's a new translation, which means that the story may be the same but none of its words are the right words. And then - as you know - I don't want to buy a DVD with three different versions of the same film on it; I want one authoritative version of my artwork, or the foundations of my world are all atremble...