aaagh editing is scary aaagh

[rushthatspeaks]

Upon having dumped the 365 Books entries for the first six months, sans relevant comments, into a text document and hitting wordcount:

the first half is 123,485 words long.

The first half.

And the book wants to have, you know, an introduction, and biographical stuff in it, and some kind of organization, and oh God I am going to have to cut three-quarters of these to make any kind of reasonable manuscript length, aren't I.

And at some point I will need to put the rest of them up on my website and index them and aaagh I hate everything so much right now how am I EVER going to get this organized.

On the one hand, I wrote like four books last year, in length, if the second half is like the first. On the other hand, now I have to get ONE book out of it.

Comments

[kate_nepveu]

Wow/yikes!

(Do you want advice, or are you venting?)

[rushthatspeaks]

Advice would be good! I am venting a little, but I'm also looking at the whole thing and going gaaaah how do I do this.

[kate_nepveu]

Apologies if this is something you are already planning to do.

Use a blog system to index them for you rather than doing it yourself.

DW won't (yet) generate a post-link-only index page through tags. But other blog systems will. My booklog is running on an out-of-date version of Movable Type, and I don't know what WordPress does these days (but it has a one-click install on most web hosts and an LJ importer, which would probably save you lots of trouble), but as you'll have noticed, I have it set up to generate lists of posts, alphabetized by subject line (which I do Last, First: (series # if relevant for proper sorting) Title), for genre, series, and author. And it builds those indices automatically from being told, on a per-post basis, what genre etc.

If I were doing this project, that would absolutely be the way I'd go.

[zeborah]

I think of 120,000 words as about right for a novel; obviously non-fiction is a totally different genre, but do you have to get it all the way down to 60,000?

Still a lot to cut. I can usually remove 10% by fiddling with wordage, but more than that requires re-envisaging what the focus of the piece (novel, short story, report, school assignment) is all about. Perhaps focusing on one particular theme or aspect or something?

[kore]

That sounds about right to me too - I always overwrite at first and then edit down ruthlessly later.

[weirdquark]

I think that as far as website indexing goes, you can use the tags you already have, so it's not organization that will be a pain so much as it being a lot of data entry. Though if you like, those of us who are librarians could probably assist you with organizing things if you want a different sort of structure.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I believe in you.

[zxhrue.livejournal.com]

sounds like a trilogy to me :)

edited to say with editing, of course

[janni.livejournal.com]

I generally write 3 or 4 books to get one, so this sounds about right to me. :-)

[xsmoonshine.livejournal.com]

Make it 4 books, one for each season. :)

[papersky.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't worry about editing until you have an editor to give you advice. This seems to me, commercially, to be a sufficiently unusual project that if anyone did want to publish it, weird length wouldn't put them off. The value to it is the 365 day nature of it and the eclecticism. Editing it into something "manageable" would lose that. And -- I've never seen anything like this as a book. There therefore isn't a fixed length for something like this. Blanding it down and editing it to imaginary standards for standard projects isn't going to help make it publishable -- if somebody decides to publish this, it will be because they think it's awesome. They're more likely to think it's awesome if they have all of it.

[gaudior.livejournal.com]

Oh, what an interesting point!

At very least, you could write the memoir-y bits/look for an agent before trying to cut stuff? Or does that not actually make sense?

At any rate, you totally did write, like, four books last year. Which = pretty damn awesome, in my opinion.

[negothick.livejournal.com]

Both great pieces of advice! The usual "pitching" advice will be of no use, since (as papersky says), there's never been anything else like this. Don't touch those book reviews! Write those memoir-y bits! Awesome indeed.

[nineweaving.livejournal.com]

What they said!

Nine

[gaudior.livejournal.com]

I have just noticed that you now have a tag for "the horror the horror."

I love you.

I kind of both do and don't want to see what else you will use that tag for.

[ashnistrike.livejournal.com]

I was going to say save some for a sequel, like Nancy Pearl, but Jo convinced me otherwise.

And huge congratulations to Ada and you and your whole family for the Pegasus nominations!