William Mangieri's Blogs: Swordsmaster is Beyond (30,000) Words (and Another Smashwords Coupon)

I’ve ramped back up on Swordsmaster (after my forced hiatus to write “Pipes”), and it’s now crossed the 30,000 word barrier. My plan was for the first draft to come in at around 75,000 words, so I’m 40% of the way there, and from what I know is going to happen in the story, I will probably hit that mark before the rough draft is complete.

And ROUGH is an understatement. As I’ve mentioned before, this is my first serious attempt at a novel. I consider myself to be a decent short fiction writer, with the one caveat being that I have not been able to master the HOOK – that trick of writing that grabs a hold of the reader on the first page and gets them to continue on, and even BUY a story because they just HAVE TO know what is going to happen. Whether this is through a lack of ability, or pure stubbornness, I am not certain, but I do know that I put very little regulation on my “muse” – I write the way the story comes to me, and I don’t try to commercialize it afterwards. On occasion I’m lucky, and the hook appears as part of my natural writing process, but it isn’t something I try for. As much value as I put on making a sale when I’m done, I should be willing to work that hook. I am not every agent’s dream…

One of the differences between short and long fiction is that you have more time to develop that hook, but you still need to develop it. When a reader knows they have a full length novel ahead of them they may give you a little bit longer to capture their interest, but you don’t want them to wonder why they’re reading this… stuff.

I am getting a lot of enjoyment watching how Swordsmaster is becoming a novel, but it would be lying if I didn’t admit that the task is becoming more and more daunting the further I get into it. I have already mentioned in an earlier posting how, instead of the two quick clean-up sessions I normally do in a short story, I know I’m going to have a host of single-purpose clean-ups and several out-and-out rewrites. Tere will be individual passes to make sure that Petron, or Dragor, or Ursul, or Marissa, or Filian, or any other character that appears in more than one scene speaks and behaves consistently. I’ll have to compare each time a particular setting is used to make sure I haven’t changed how long a street is or how tall a building or how far they have to travel to get somewhere. And tons of fleshing out descriptions that I wouldn’t have even needed if this was short fiction.

There are two serious problems with rewrites. The first is that they are a black hole that many stories (and writers) enter and never escape from. In many cases, it is a convenient excuse to not have to finish your work and actually let someone read it because “it just needs this one little tweak.” The roads to novels are littered with perpetually altered and discarded pages.

The second problem with rewrites is homogenization. When a story first comes out of your left brain (the creative part), it has a particular character – a unique voice. You can cover material that has been done before by others, and yet the voice itself can make it worth reading. Once you start to rewrite, your right brain takes over (the part with all the rules inside), and then there is a real danger of muting that voice by trying to make it conform to the way you are SUPPOSED to write. It may only be a tiny bit at a time, but too many rewrites and the story will sound like any other story written by anyone else. And once that happens, why would anyone want to read it?

(You may not be able to tell from all this, but I really am enjoying writing this story. Just saying…)

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My featured work this week is “Mutiny on the Star-Bound” (Martin Henshaw, a humble digital mechanic, is shanghaied into the middle of a mutiny on a Transgalaxian colony ship) - here’s the link: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/439441?ref=NoTimeToThink

Use coupon code YF28L to save 72% off the list price at check out on smashwords (that’s right – just 99-cents.) The coupon is good through August 10^th. Enjoy!

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William Mangieri’s writing (including his latest ePublication “Reflections”) can be found in many places, including: