DEBORAH CROMBIE: I have news!! I finally got to type the two most satisfying words in the English language, at least for me: THE END
A KILLING OF INNOCENTS, Kincaid/James #19, is finally, finally finished!! Trumpets, please!
That's the good news.
The bad news is that the finished manuscript is 550 pages long, about 126,00 words, so yes, I confess that I'm Red A from Hallie's Behind the Scenes at the Sausage Factory post on Monday. That is a doorstop of a book.
I confess that I am (obviously) an over-writer. I put in too much detail, and I am perpetually guilty of telling not showing, one of the cardinal writing sins. And I love putting in directions, which makes my editor want to tear her hair out. Readers don't really want to know where your character turned left or right and which street leads to into what street, or which bus they take. I realize this is my way of putting myself into a scene, but it should definitely be a case of less is more.
So how do you go about cutting that many pages? You snip a sentence here, a paragraph there, an entire scene if it's not advancing the plot, and all those little tweaks add up. Or at least that's the idea! I'm down 70 pages now, at a bit more than halfway through the book, and I promise you won't miss them.
Readers, do you think about length when you choose a book? Do you have preferences, depending of the type of book? I might expect, for instance, a fantasy novel to be longer than a mystery, or a multiple viewpoint story to be longer than one told from first person. I want a book to be long enough to be satisfying, but not so long that I think I need a vacation to read it--unless I actually have a vacation to read it in!
A KILLING OF INNOCENTS is available for pre-order from all your favorite booksellers.
