It has taken a while, but I passed the 100,000 word mark this morning. To be precise, I have now written 100,027 words, and the last one was ‘shock’. It has been some time since I announced passing 90,000 words, but I didn’t spend all that time writing. I discovered that my published works needed some minor revisions before Christmas, and devoted several weeks to doing that instead.
Nevertheless, I returned to writing A New Allegiance properly this week, and have passed the major landmark. 100,000 words is the average length of a novel. It equates to about 330 pages, usually, but it works out at 340 pages in this case. The actual page count depends on variables like where chapters end. This book is also divided into a Prologue, two parts, called Heimat (Homeland) and Blighty (Ausland) repectively. There will also be an Epilogue in due course, but that isn’t written yet. The two parts have title pages of their own, so that affects the overall number of pages.
How much remains to be written? Difficult to say. I know what I want to happen, but I am not yet sure how much text it will take up. I am quite certain that the completed first draft will be more than 130,000 words, but the published edition will not be that long. Having completed the first draft, I must then edit it. This is where many self-published authors fall down. They fail to edit their work properly. I am not one of them. I have trained myself to be a ruthless editor, so I will not be at all surprised if the final version is reduced in length by at least a fifth. Trust me. It will be better for it.
I have ideas for a cover and will soon have to log into my account with Dreamstime to see if they can supply suitable images. If so, I will probably need two and use photo-editing software to amalgamate them into a single image., I will let you know when I have come up with something.
Leave a Reply