Edits on Novel #4 (the music novel) are coming along nicely. It’s a huge undertaking, and right now it’s only getting huger. The first draft that we presented to our critique group was 155,000 words (!), which we know full well is long. We gave ourselves a pass on the expansive word count, though, because 20,000 of those words were in the service of supplementary material. Sure, the fancy extras were meant to appear in the finished product, but they weren’t actually part of the narrative, exactly, so they didn’t really count. Right? That’s what we told ourselves in order to be able to sleep at night.

Well, now that we’re deep into the edits, our baby has bloated up to over 180,000 (!!!). Yes, that still includes the supplemental material, and, yes, we’re planning to keep that aspect. In fact, we’ll probably need even more of it, for reasons too complicated to go into right now.

We’ve added something like 35,000 words of new material, and we’ve already removed somewhere between 5,000 and 10,000. It’s hard to keep track of exactly what’s going on, because some scenes have been snipped in one place and expanded in another.

Word count is not the best way to track your progress, and it’s not at all an indication of quality. We know this, and we’re trying really hard not to worry about it. But come on! It’s 180,000 words! We know that’s ridiculous. We know!

The good news is that we still have half of the manuscript to edit, and (fingers crossed) most of those edits should involve removing material that’s now superfluous because it’s covered in all the new material that comes earlier.

I guess this is one potential downside to having a coauthor. One writer working alone would need twice as long to dig a hole this deep.

We got into this situation together, and we’ll help each other get out of it, too.

A writing partner is invaluable for talking through the problems in a manuscript, and making a plan to fix them. A writing partner is a wonderful resource to rely on when faced with a daunting project, like editing an entire novel. And a writing partner makes the best drinking companion when you look at that insane word count and just need a minute to, you know, lose your mind.