Life, Writing, Weirdness

I’ve been working on a Superhero novel that’s changed working titles a few times, but has come back to Heroic Genesis twice now, and that’s where it’s been for several weeks now.

Recently, I suggested that the novel could be done as early as the middle of May, although that was before April proved to be as academically tough as it was. The first draft should certainly be done sometime in June. In fact, if I can maintain 1000 words a day, on average, added to it, then yes according to my original plan it probably would have been done in mid-June.

But that plan, matched up to my outline, suggests that there are about 40,000 words left to go in an 80- to 85,000-word story.

Up until a couple of chapters ago, that outline was working fairly well. It was, however, a fairly limited outline, not even a third of what I’d usually do, and the bulk of it was in the first half of the story. Close to the middle, things got a little vague. In fact, the whole middle third of the book is covered in a hundred words or so like, “one on one training scenarios with individuals having other power sets”. Nice and detailed with no hint of what I intended for those scenarios, if I intended anything specific, when I wrote it.

This is why I usually do more substantial plotting. Well, that and to make sure my scene length estimates actually mean something. With a little bit of effort and slightly more filling in on the plot points, they do now.

But it means that I’m not actually halfway into the book yet. Heroic Genesis might, based on my new projection, be as long as 125,000 words which would make it the second longest single-volume story I’ve ever written. The longest is a fantasy novel that was supposed to be first in a trilogy and will probably never come out of the trunk with a first draft at 126,427 words. But for Heroic Genesis, using that 125k estimate means I’ve got about 70k to go.

If it’s that long, could I split it in two? Well, maybe. The problem is the only potential natural breakpoint is about 85,000 words in. There are a couple of things later in the book that I could expand a bit without too much trouble and probably not feel like padding so much as character development for the secondaries, and teambuilding for whatever I choose to call the team, but not enough to get things to nearly the same length. If one big story is going to be a pair of shorter ones, I’d prefer that they’re of similar magnitude.

Maintaining pace the whole time, which isn’t guaranteed, and accounting for the course I’m taking at the end of May and the conferences in June and July, that probably means a late-July finish.

That’s not the end of the world, because it will still be the second novel finishing a first draft for this year, and another (plotted in much more detail) has a chance to be the third, after a couple of other books have had an editing pass to advance them.

A writer’s work is never done. There are always more words.

Be well, everyone.