Here’s something that I find myself surprised with as I am writing what I am hoping is the last major draft to my story.
So, currently, Conjured Secrets is on it’s 10th draft. It’s pretty far in. (or at least, I would think it’s 10). The bigger certainty is I have been working on this concept and story for about 5 years, closer to 6. It’s a long time! I can’t believe I have been working on Conjured Secrets for this long, and have been writing, creating and expanding the world of character’s in it.
And in the last draft, I find myself writing a total of approximately 96,000 words. It’s a pretty long book.
Where are you up to?
But as I have been typing away on my computer for the story, where currently I am writing about the libraries and going into the details about the interesting things they hold.
Going from what I have written from the start to now, 21,000 words is written to get to that point, meanwhile, this draft has taken about 14600 words. This is a bit worrying for me. I mean, it’s said to Kill your Darlings, but stripping close to 7000 words ALONE on this story so far. I really wonder if it’s going to be around the 80000 word mark. Most of the dialogue seems to be cut, but I can imagine that it would be retold in some shape or form.
Maybe the character will show it later instead of another character telling the protagonist what happened or the character’s thoughts on a particular topic. It’s pretty scary to see that most of it is cut… BUT I will say there is an extra 5000 words I’ve added, which is about 3 scenes, that I may need to revise when I get to that point.
Regardless, all I can do is wish myself luck, even though it feels long, knuckle down on the process and hope that this story will turn out ok, and… Just see how it all turns out.