The first thing I’m going to say is that this post has nothing to do with groundhogs, alarm clocks or orangesicles – well, that is, aside from stating that it has nothing to do with them.
It’s been a while since my last post and while nothing major has happened from that time until now, I figure an update on the smaller details should suffice. Where to start?
On Wednesday this week BYU held a “Publishers Fair” in the Wilkinson Center. I attended, and the first thing I noticed is how empty the place was. It felt like walking into some sort of…boring place. But I had decided to attend and had that planned for quite some time (in fact, I even put a reminder in my phone which is quite unusual for me). I entered. Most of the tables looked like LDS literature publishers – BYU Studies was there as were some other small publishers. But then I saw Jame’s Dashner‘s most recent book standing up on a table and I knew I’d found Shadow Mountain. Of course I went over and realized about fifteen minutes later that I was sitting in front of the one “and only” Lisa Mangum. She gave me some good advice that brings me to my next topic of discussion.
I asked Lisa Mangum what the word count range for a general Shadow Mountain children’s book would be. She said they tend to run around 90k words. Some more talk revealed that this is a little higher than the average middle grades book (I figured so after reading The Journal of Curious Letters) which tend to run around 40k on the very short side to 70k on average.
But anyway, I’m rambling and becoming hyperlinking-happy. I decided that rather than try to lengthen my book (whose first draft stands at 36k or so words and whose second draft is at 25k), I’m going to take my “Trilogy of trilogies” idea that I haven’t explained here and turn that into a trilogy with trilogious (nice word, huh?) parts. At worst I can write the three parts, finish revisions and decide that for word counts and book size, they need to be split up once more. So I’ve begun work on the second book or second part, whichever you want to call it – I think I’ll call them parts until I’ve seen the first book in print, if I ever do.
I don’t want to make the novel-writing process drag now that I’m writing two more parts before submitting, so I’ve set myself the goal to finish the complete book’s first and second drafts before the end of the summer – which means I’ve got a lot of writing ahead of me. That’s not a bad thing, but I’m wondering how I’ll hold up to the challenge. As soon as I get off here, I’m going over to an Excel spreadsheet of all my writing to figure out about how many words I need to add to the book per day. Exciting and scary…we’ll see what happens, but only if I sign off from this post… … … … right now!