Gaaaaasssssp!

And finally I re-emerge.  Criminy, that was some hard writing.  I've been crowing about this a bit elsewhere, but once more isn't going to hurt anyone:

250,000 words, motherfuckers!  Ha!

I don't even know who that's aimed at.  Maybe at the last person, other than me, who looks at this blog.^*

The novel version of Crown Wearer has had a long, tough journey.  It took me forever to get up off my arse to start the thing in the first place and then another aeon passed before I got organised enough to make a proper go of it.  And that only happened once I stopped being intimidated by the length I initially thought it was going to be – a length it exceeded by about 70,000 words.

Now, to some people, all this talk of word counts is meaningless.  I sympathise with you, I really do.  Actually, I envy you.  Not knowing the significance of word count would make my life a whole lot easier as a writer.  I imagine being able to sit down at the computer, grinning from ear to ear, with my mug with the rainbow on the side, filled with more rainbows and clack out a couple of thousand words, no worries.  There are some days like that, y'know, without that weird rainbow business, but a lot of days are wrangling and subduing words that end up not being right anyway.  And, yes, that does involve a lot of staring off into the middle distance, it's an intellectual pursuit.^**

So now I'm left with this manuscript, damp from brain juice and imagination placenta.  What am I going to do with it?  Who could possibly want this smelly, sticky brick of a manuscript from a writer who's never had a book published outside of a couple of disastrous Lulu attempts?  Not my priority at the moment, is the answer (I bet you thought I was going to go on a rant, faithless bastards).  For now what I'm going to do is follow the advice of every writer out there and leave it the fuck alone.  That's right, it's going to sit on my various storage devices for a couple of months while I do other things and get a little distance between myself and it.

Unlike a good cheese, when I cut through the rind of the novel I won't be rewarded with the sweet nutty taste of aged milk, I'll be confronted by the horror of what I've actually written.  Something riddled with spelling and grammar errors.  Something that doesn't make a lick of sense because of a network of glaringly embarrassing plot holes.  Hey, look at that, another cheese analogy.^†


And I'll be lost again.  Knee deep in the toxic porridge I've crusted the page with in hopes that some kind person will take pity on this mangled wretch and publish this monster of a book^‡


For now, I'm back, ready to spew my neurotic semi-psychotic ramblings at your brain craters.  We're going to have fun, dammit!


^* The person who came back and thought this time it would be different.  Sucker.


^** Only geniuses and idiots claim they can bang out stories without thinking about it.  If anyone you know says this and unless you know for certain otherwise slap that fucking idiot.


^† I really want some Norwegian brown cheese.  The stuff sounds amazing.


^‡ It's only a partial monster.  My research tells me it's at the lower end in length of one of George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire books.  And less than half the length of things like War and Peace, The Stand and Atlas Shrugged, so there you go.




Will