The Next Book
The good news: the novel I was planning to try and edit to publish this year is a full 80,000 words shorter than I’d feared it was.
The less good news: it’s still almost 130k and that is definitely about 40-50k too many. Such is the way of things when you’re me, and you throw yourself into a jungle of words and just try and carve a path through to some kind of ending.
This is a different story to the Secret Rewrite I’ve been doing: that’s (hopefully) for agent submissions and the like; this is for self-publishing, to try and keep up my streak of a new book roughly once a year. It’s not Boiling Seas 3. That’s next year’s entry if all goes to plan. It is fantasy, but it’s a standalone. Providing I can get it to a short enough length to cram it all between a single set of covers.
It will be a darker tale than what I’ve put out before. To summarise without giving too much away, it’s about a world that’s already mostly ended, and the unhappy few who stand in the very last fortress between the apocalypse and what’s left of humankind. It’s not a cheery story. There are monsters, of both the monstrous and human variety, and some of them are even on the side of the enemy. There’s a lot of death, a lot of despair. But there is, underneath all that, hope. There has to be, otherwise there wouldn’t be anything much for me to write about.
I wrote this manuscript a good while ago – according to the file metadata, I finished it at some point in 2018 – so even if it wasn’t far too long there would be a need for a decent amount of polishing and tweaking. But I genuinely thought this thing was over 200,000 words, and had thus written it off as far too big a project to get finished and ready by the end of this year. Finding out it was only about 130k was a very pleasant surprise indeed. And from glancing at it, the prose seems pretty good by my standards. (It was written after The Blackbird and the Ghost, and that seemed to go down well enough!)
But it will need plenty of cutting down. Thankfully I can already see plenty of places where I can lift out whole unnecessary chunks, and I’ve got a tighter structure in mind to keep things nice and contained. Once I get that down, it’ll hopefully just be a matter of trimming and tweaking to taste.
I think I might be able to get this one done by Christmas. And I’ve certainly got more time to try and do it now. So I’m going to give it a damn good go.
If that doesn’t work, you can have a novella. I’ve got a few of those kicking around and I’d like people to read them eventually. But the plan is to get the book out. It might be tight, but I think I can do it.
Stay tuned for more news.
