How about this winter, huh? I don’t know what it’s like where you live, but here in Skelleyville we’ve gotten about 3,000 feet of snow this year. Couple that with the polar vortex and its subzero temperatures, and we have not been able to maintain our routine of walking conferences.

Call us wimps if you must, but we’d rather stay inside with the fire and a mug or two of hot buttered rum.

A few weeks ago the temperature rose several degrees and we felt brave enough to suit up and take some walks in the winter wonderland. It felt good to stretch our legs, and to have the time to talk through some of the issues that have come up in the editing of the music novel. Sure we can have those conversations inside, but we find that we often make more progress as we progress around the neighborhood. A change of scenery is always good, and the physical activity puts us in a different headspace. New ideas emerge. It’s pretty cool.

So it’s a good thing we found another way to derail ourselves!

Meet Lady Marzipan. She’s incredibly cute, and incredibly distracting. When we’re working in the writing cave, sometimes she’ll lay and quietly guard the door against invading uffdeguffs (and teenagers), but more often she loses her tennis ball under the furniture, or chews on her squeaky octopus, or rattles her plastic chew bone on the hardwood floor. (Yes, our cave has a wooden floor. Doesn’t yours?)

And who can resist that face?

Now when we take walks, she joins us, and our conversations go like this:

Jen: How’s that scene you’re working on?

Kent: Going pretty well. I’m getting close to the — hey, Lady Marzipan! That’s not your squirrel!

She’s a fuzzy little test of our multitasking abilities. (They’re not all that impressive, turns out.) But on the plus side, Kent and Jen now have someone to cast the tie-breaking vote on those rare occasions when it’s needed!

Last night we completed our read-through on the music novel. We knew that the latter portion of it would contain a fair amount of misplaced recap, because of the restructuring (the latter portion was originally the early portion, in fact it was originally the whole book, rife with flashbacks). We did find such material, but it doesn’t have as much bulk as we were expecting, so cutting it back isn’t going to have as much of an impact on the Brobdingnagian word count. Furthermore, there’s stuff we still need to add. Hoo boy. It’s looking like this one could flirt with 200k.

But that’s okay. The book will be the right size, based on the story it contains. There are guidelines, but there isn’t a magic number of words that “good” books consist of.

This attitude is a bit of an adjustment for Kent, in particular. He’s tended to be a bit keyed up about not letting things get too big. In this case, it’s just a bigger story, with more world-building required. There’s also a large cast, all of whom have important functions in the narrative. It’s just big, period.

The scale of your book becomes another point on which you need to agree with your partner. If one of you is thinking of it as a novella and the other as a saga, you’ll probably realize early on that more discussion is needed. But once you’ve agreed that what you’re plotting is “a novel,” be careful of miscommunication. That word could describe anything from about sixty thousand words on up. Of course, there’s an upside to a partnership (as always). A writing partner is someone to help get things in perspective. Editing is a lot of work, and cutting clever stuff is especially hard. It’s all too easy to make excuses for keeping too many words, not paring things down (or conversely for not fleshing them out — too few words is not a typical Rune Skelley problem but we can see how it could happen). A good partner will push for doing things right.