It's Been a While...

Well... it has.

Finals happened.  And they hit HARD.  Then I was essentially MIA from the internet for a few days in the midst of hanging out with irl friends.  (*GASP* WHAT? I HAVE THOSE?)

Wow, that's totally not professional in the slightest.  But really, who said this was a professional blog? This is a blog about my book and my journey of rewriting it.

As that rewriting journey is coming along (hopefully faster now that finals are over) I have come to the conclusion that I'm splitting it in half.  The original draft was 137K+ words.  Which is way more than any YA  fantasy novel can get published with by a first-time potentially published author.  (To put things in perspective, I believe the first Harry Potter book was about 78K.)

Currently, the rewrite project is at 92K.  It was at 91K when I concluded I was going to split it.  There is just too much going on for it to feasibly happen all in one book.  I have character and plot developments that range from should-happen to need-to-happen if this is going to be good.  My biggest challenge now is making that last 8K really count.  I have a list of things that need to happen and an idea about what the new end will look like.  I'm in the middle of moving things around at the moment.

It's rather amusing, my computer looks a lot like: old draft over there, new draft over here, extra document with stuff that I wrote in the new document and then took out because it's gonna have to move to the second half, notepad full of little reminders, then physical notebook with plot-vomit session in it.  (The plot-vomit used to be on my closet mirrors, but since I'm not at that apt. for the holidays, I had to move it all.)

I believe it is better for the novel to be split, I can make things happen better now.  As my boyfriend's father said, (though he was technically referring to the Lord of the Rings movies) you can either chop a book to pieces to make it a script and then no one will like it, or you can split it into parts and hit everything that needs to be hit for a good story.  The last Harry Potter book was split into two movies.  (So was the last Twilight book... but moving on...) I heard somewhere that the original Lord of the Rings book was ONE BOOK and then the editor split it into THREE.  The last Wheel of Time book was split into two or three books.   So, it happens.

No, I'm not entirely thrilled that this book will no longer end with that epic battle.  It's cool, it's going to be better this way!