Saturday, March 22, 2008

Word count blues

I haven't mentioned this one in a while, so plug time! Strange Worlds of Lunacy: The Galaxy's Silliest Anthology is available for pre-order. I've got a story in the TOC, so of course I heartily recommend it!

I finished the story revisions I've been working on--although I do need to go over them again, as I'm sure there are rough spots and I bet I can cut some too. At the moment, though, it's 13,300 words. So not good. But at least it's done.

And my horror story is getting flabby. It's almost 3,000 words long, and I estimate I have another 2,000 words of plot to get down. But I do think I can trim a good thousand words off that one--I did a lot of revving up at the beginning, and all that can be cut. In general, I find I can almost always cut some from the beginning of a story. It's not always 100% clear where a story begins until I actually write it.

2 comments:

Cate Gardner said...

Ooh, flabby is good. I like it when you can make a story nice and tight.

K.C. Shaw said...

Yeah, it's much more satisfying than reading a story over and thinking, "Well, something's wrong here but damned if I know what." :)