Life, Writing, Weirdness

I’ve been trying to put a much tighter focus on my fiction work this year, working on one draft of one major project at a time. If I find I have a little extra time, I may do some editing, but it’s mainly big progress on the major fiction project and some progress on the Memory Project. I did get through the second draft of The Hauntings of Fiona fairly quickly and easily in the background. That was made easier by travel: two trips to another city by train totalling something around 11 hours. For some reason, I find it easier to revise or adjust than draft when I’m in a moving vehicle.

And it’s the fiction project on my mind in a significant way. I talked about Heroic Genesis on the blog in early May, with the short version of that post being that I’d originally plotted things out to be an 80-85k word story but at that time I suggested, due to expanded sequences and things I’d wanted to do to set up things I’d plotted, it could now end up being as long as 125k. I was only expecting to go over 100k, which I think is already a little on the long side for a superhero novel most of the time.

Five weeks later and I’m now going to suggest that it’s going to go at least 130k and based on things I think I may need to expand, may reach 150k. These seems excessive for a single superhero novel, though I know it’s been done in the past. My current plot estimate seems to hover around 140k.

There is an essentially natural split point at about 83k in the first draft, so having the story become two novels is within the realms of possibility. I’ve had to do that kind of split before when working on the Troll World novels, and I did end up disentangling the three plot lines in Warforge: Caledonia into three long novellas that would edit out to be short novels, so this is really only a matter of degree.

But I think I’ve come to the conclusion that this one isn’t a matter of the plot getting away from me so much as me underestimating the things I wanted to accomplish to be the story I want to tell. I keep thinking about things in the manner of, “well this scene doesn’t really flow naturally from previous scenes if I don’t have this other thing(s) happen first.” So it expands a bit more.

And then, for some reason, I have some thoughts about things that aren’t even going to happen in this story. I don’t even know if I want to write another story in this particular version of Earth but there are a couple of relationships I want to make sure are properly established in case I do. Chekov’s Gun. The two big ones are already firmly in the rearview in this story. One of those is not developed in the way I want it to be and the other needs just a touch more emphasis in the right spot and perhaps a small hint in a future scene so it seems reasonable if I ever do come back to this world.

The short version of all this? When I posted about Heroic Genesis in early May, I was about 57k words in with 40-45k words of plot left to draft but thought there might be a lot of expansion potential between me and the end of the story. Just about seven weeks later (AND, due to external goings on, I’ve put very little work in on it in the past two weeks), I’m about 95k in with about 49k of plot left based on those expansions, and I don’t think it’s stopped expanding quite yet.

I’ve committed to myself that I’m just going to let the story breathe and be what it needs to be in terms of length. My thought was that the moment it looks like it will probably break 140k, I’d start thinking about it as on story spanning two novels, a duology that’s sometimes called, but I’ve already figured out where the split is happening and have decided to just bite the bullet and call it that. And while I’m currently projecting 142-144k words, I’m expecting something on the far side of 150k.

But I’m going to keep drafting until I get to the end of the story. That’s part of my plan for future writing: if there is going to be more than a stand alone novel, I want to write them consecutively to make sure the first draft of the whole thing is as coherent as possible. I’ll edit them the same way through each of the future drafts after the first. I don’t think I’m an ongoing series kind of writer, although one of the things I’m planning has the potential to be 12 or 13 short novels to cover the full story.

Right now, though, I need to keep making progress on this one.

Be well, everyone.