Words Written Yesterday - 0
Yesterday I got sidelined by a headache. I get headaches pretty frequently so it takes a bad one to do me in, but last night after work was spent on my couch trying to keep the dog from eating my fingers. I'm convinced that if I died in my house, Maxx would have no problem eating me to stay alive.
The only good thing about debilitating headaches is that I usually wake up the next day feeling spectacular. Today before work I managed to really nail a scene that I've had in mind since this story was just a crazy idea I jotted down in my notebook. Plus I'm not past the half-way mark and on my way to 80k words. I've still got some more words left in me to write later tonight, so I'll update today's post later.
Hope you all are doing well!
80,000 words seems a big long for middle grade, no? What genre is it? Fantasy? Just curious.
ReplyDeleteTracy - I'm firmly in the camp that a book is as long or short as it needs to be. There are some great MG's that are in the 90k-120k range (The Mysterious Benedict Society) and some YA's that hit the 30k range (Wake).
ReplyDeleteEither way, I've got a map in my head and this book feels like 80k words. That doesn't take into account that it's likely that about 10% of that will be tossed in first round revisions.
It's magical realism. It's based in the real world but there's time travel and exploding playground equipment and pirates and giant lizards and quantum physics. Mostly it's just an adventure. It's my first foray into MG lit so we'll see how it turns out.
I agree, absolutely, that a story should be as long as it needs to be. But 90-120k words is dangerous territory with MG audience. It better be damn good. There's Benedict, Potter, and a few others, but not many.
ReplyDeleteGood luck with this story. Sounds fun. Love magical realism.
BTW - I thought Benedict started strong and then dragged from there.