Edit and fluff

The editing process is much harder than the original headlong rush of getting a story into being. It's astonishing how much.

It's also usual for books in this genre to be 100k or 150k words, with longer ones common. Shorter is less common. There's a content per dollar issue; they have a certain minimum amount of overhead, and too small a book won't sell for what "they" would have to charge.

NaNoWriMo got us to generate 50k words in a month. For me that was reasonably easy. I fabricated a fluff plot, and engaged my natural tendency to logorrhoea (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logorrhoea). Voila, 50k.

Now I'm trying to tune that down to real content, paring away the extraneous smellies and firming up the style as well as the consistency of the plot and progress. In the process, I need to triple the size of the text, without contributing to the existing problem. Hm... eliminate the bad stuff and triple the size. See anything amiss?

Even so, it's working. The story is coming together, and growing. The parts that were just too contrived are being converted to better and more believable events, and so far I've managed to salvage a surprising amount of the previous writing.

Of course, other hobbies wither on the vine. I haven't had a chance to role-play much since moving off to live out in the boonies, and the few chances we've arranged have been... well, we don't do it anymore. For someone who used to spend 80 hours a week on such games, this is a significant loss. For a while I was substituting World of Warcraft, but now that languishes as well. I play Pirates and Farmville on Facebook, but real games take more time than my life has to spare right now. My hobby has become writing, and someday I hope to make it my career.