How long was the book originally?

[NumberLord]

How long was the original manuscript? Did Donihe make you shorten it? It seems like a lot of Bizarro books are short, which I find weird--I would have loved to read more about this Fruit World.

[Gabriel]

Follow-up Question: If you shortened it (which I believe you have said you did in the NBAS group), did you learn anything in the process that will help you with future books. I found the entire book to be one of the most complete of the NBAS this year, but don't know how much more there needed to be (though I loved the world you created).

[Eric]

The New Bizarro Author Series has a wordcount limit of about 15,000 to 30,000 words. I exceeded that. After cutting it down over the course of over a month or two of editing, I still exceeded it. Bizarro books by first-time authors are short. This is intentional. The story should move quickly, and the book should not take more than two hours to read. However, I am used to writing long stories between 50,000 and 75,000 words. In the final draft, I'd say BoF was between Old Man and the Sea and the Great Gadsby in length.

I did not have a first draft of over 9,000 pages. That was an inside joke based on an Internet meme. However, every time Kevin Donihe sent me a shorter version that he had edited down, I sent a longer version back to him. There was a lot of cutting, but I think it was for the best. You might notice that my book is the longest of the NBAS and is in the smallest font size. We barely fit it in.

(Gabriel now) I think it is better to over-write and then cut things down. What I cut out was mostly things that could be more effectively implied. In future books, I will probably follow this model, which is actually the way I tend to converse: think about everything; say what is necessary. That means to write the entire world and then cut out everything but what you need to tell this particular story.