Size Does Matter

We are so close to done with the first draft of Son of Science Novel we can taste it!

Jen wrote the final scene yesterday, but we’re not actually done. Kent has one more scene on his plate that will fall before the last scene. Um. Obviously.

Here’s the thing. This draft is going to come it at around 95,000 words. That’s a lot of words, right? That’s a very satisfying, lengthy novel. We should be happy! The problem is that Science Novel, the book that this is a sequel to, is currently 121,000 words. That’s quite a discrepancy!

While Science Novel has had some edits, there is certainly still some flab there to be carved away. It will get smaller. But so will Son of SN when we edit it. The discrepancy will remain. Jen has this hangup about all the chapters in a book being roughly the same size, and all the books in a series, too. The key word here is “roughly.” No matter how much Kent teases, she doesn’t actually want all the chapters to be exactly the same length. But they should be able to measured with the same yardstick.

Since Jen is the keeper of the outline, and the creator of the stubs, she has seen this word count disaster coming for a while now and she’s been running around like Chicken Little. Now that the end is in sight, Kent has finally begun to believe her. We’ve given a lot of thought to the ‘problem,’ trying to figure out where it all went wrong. Every novel we’ve written previously has come out well above 100,000. Hell, the one before this (Son of Music Novel) came it at 182,900 (which we are not going to round to 183,000 goddammit). Our current draft feels like the runt of the litter.

The problem is not lack of plot. We have enough plot to choke a horse. Before we started writing, we were concerned that we might have another monster on our hands. It would be nice to think we’ve just improved our craft so much that we have transcended the need for editing, but the sky in our world is blue, just like yours.

We have identified a few places where we need to expand things, and we think we’ve discovered a hole that needs to be filled. It’s not 25,000 words worth of stuff, but it might get us up to the magic 100K.

Our current plan is to have Kent write that one last scene that is not the last scene, and then read the manuscript through, looking for what’s missing. It shouldn’t take long, since it’s so damn short.