wordage

[julesjones]

I finished a novelette first draft on Sunday -- some 12400 words, which took exactly a month to write. I sent it off to the alpha reader for comments, and she seems to think that the basic story is good, so on to the revision pass at some point. That's going to include cutting enough words to bring it under 12,000 words, because the story was written for a market with that maximum.

No hurry on doing that, because the submission deadline is some months away. The problem I've got is that there are three other anthologies I'd like to write something for, and they all have deadlines of 1 July. Thank you, muse, for handing me ideas out of deadline order. It looks as if my current output rate of raw draft is 5 to 10 kwords a month on a good month, which means I'm not going to be able to write something for all three. One is 2.5 or 5 kwords, one is 3.5-12 kwords, and one is minimum of 8 kwords, which means that unless I get an attack story, the latter is the one that's not happening. It's also the one where I've pretty much blanked on story ideas. Which is annoying, because it's one I'd really like to write for.

I also need to get back to the novel-length WIP, but I need to do some research for that one and haven't had a chance to do so. Don't think that one's going to be ready for publication this year, which is a shame.

Comments

[carl-allery.livejournal.com]

You're producing a good amount of wordage on a monthly basis. I think anyone would be pushed to write three stories in a month to good quality, whatever the wordage. And of course 2 out of 3 is never bad. ;)

Basically, don't let 'deadlines' push you beyond your comfort zone - that way lies burn out. :)

[julesjones]

The risk of burnout is why I'm going, "Yeah, not going to do the one with the longest minimum length requirements." :-)

It turns out that there are only 2 for the beginning of July -- I'd forgotten that Barbara had moved the deadline for the Mammoth anthology back by a month, so that's end of July now. Nevertheless, I think I'll still be skipping the really long one.

I did have a trawl through the trunk, and found something that might actually work as the basis for the long one -- it's an unpublished 4.2 kword I wrote to submit to an S/M anthology years ago, and I always felt that it felt a bit cramped at that length, so I could probably expand it to 8 kwords quite easily. But it's old enough that I'd probably have to rewrite from scratch, rather than adding to the existing text. I'd rather give myself plenty of time to work on something for the anthology with shorter length requirements.