I’m about three weeks out from a complete Penumbra manuscript… I think. That’s figuring 2-3 hours a night of work followed by a 12+ hour marathon session I’ve got planned for the beginning of February. After that I’m shipping it out to beta readers. Exciting, but scary!

I’ve already had a brief alpha read through of what was previously the first “half” of my novel. That first “half” has turned into the first third, so even those readers are going to be getting essentially a brand new story. I’ve got some concerns about my twist being too obvious and I’m still struggling with nailing down some character motivation, but I think I’m on track.

It’s hard, I posted before about how I realized I had way too many words (60k for what was supposed to be 1/3 of the story) and so I’ve been painstakingly cutting it down more and more until I could have a refined, concise story. So much of that is trimming fat, but inevitably that means you’re going to be cutting juice bits that you want to keep. After all, it’s the fat that has the flavor isn’t it?

The hardest part about trimming (or killing your darlings as authors like to say) is that you shouldn’t necessarily kill everything. The problem becomes what do you choose to cut. This is a topic I’d like to discuss in depth some time later, maybe dedicate a whole post to it, because there’s a lot to consider, so for now I’ll just state that for me, I’ve found that it so comes down to trying to decide if the number of words that your fat requires is worth the space it takes up.

85k sounds like a lot. But as I’ve said before, it really isn’t. You will be amazed at how fast you’ll hit 85k words and surpass it, then wonder how on earth you’ll finish before the 200k word mark. But unless you’re writing epic fantasy, you’ve got to trim that sucker down.

I’ve finished Stranger Things, the greatly lauded series on Netflix finally. And you know what? I liked it. I didn’t love it, but I thought it was good. Though it wasn’t fantastic. It nailed it’s tone and style perfectly, which is what most people seem to praise it for, though I think it suffered from having too many writers and from not having a clear enough focus on the story. It strikes me as a show that was obsessed with selling you on its tone and setting so much it kind of let the story slip a bit. But, like I said, it was still good, still enjoyable. I think I’ll add it to the list of things that I do an analysis of sometime.

But for now, I need to work.