Avoiding writing this evening, I found an older post on Colleen Lindsay's blog, The Swivet, about novel length and miscellaneous issues related. You ought to read this, and all the comments, too. Repeatedly. it's tough love but we have to understand novel length trends (sob! I have to cut my novel!)
The Swivet [Colleen Lindsay]: On word counts and novel length.
LOVED it! Thanks for posting the link. My YA is just over 60,000 words, so I was glad to see that I was right on target. I've known several would-be YA authors who cite the Twilight and Harry Potter books as evidence tht debut authors can get away with publishing huge tomes but, frankly, those are very rare exceptions. Plus they're not taking into account the fact that YA books tend to have bigger text, more space between lines, and larger margins, which gives the appearance of a higher word count.
Posted by: Caryn | March 23, 2009 at 10:19 PM
I love long books. It's been a struggle to slim my opus to appropriate proportions.
Posted by: Tara Maya | March 24, 2009 at 12:52 AM
I went back to the trunk novel recently, which was my first serious book project after dabbling for years. I set it aside because it was like a freaking bloated tick, with so much good stuff I didn't want to cut and too much plot and too much of everything else.
As an experiment (no doubt in masochism) I'm letting it expand as it wishes in the plot department and I'm focusing instead on gettin ggood plot structure and characterization.
As might be expected, it's not getting any smaller. I suspect three books of material are in this thing, and so that's what I'm writing: three books in one. Or at least two!
Because these professionals who keep saying 100k max really do mean it. Why should I expect to be an exception?
Posted by: writtenwyrdd | March 24, 2009 at 06:29 AM