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Oct. 7th, 2009 01:06 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lenora_roseHuh.
This draft of Bird of Dusk so far is 126,291 words. That is... actually, about 30k less than I thought it was.
This is really good news, considering that over the last few years, more and more agents have been refusing to take anything much over 120k.
Granted, with somewhere in the vicinity of 16k to go (This last number is an admitted guesstimate), I'm still currently too long.
And I only carved serious wordage out of the first half, to the tune of something like 7k. The second half, I've edited less often, and so I'll probably be able to cut enough and more than enough to bring the word count down.
I'm still having a bugger of a time coming up with a query that isn't either a paragraph too short and vague to use (Which I think is also the killer in the Raising the Storm query currently out - so many places say to keep it as short as possible, so I do, then I read successful queries that are three or five times the length), or too darn long. I was trying that tonight; it felt like the thing to do.
However, tomorrow I suspect begins with a quest for a new keyboard. In removing a key beside the space bar to get rid of a specific bit of terrible gunk, I seem to have actually done something to the space bar. (You don't want to know how many times I had to go back and add spaces in this post.)
I type too hard as it is; having to slam down hard to get a space... agh.
But not only is this keyboard probably already the host to far too many horrors, I've also rubbed off the letters e, a, s, c,v,n,m, and half the d and o. And the arrow keys are vanishing.(And not actually attached anymore; the arrow left regularly flies to the floor.)
Fortunately, my taste in keyboards is shamelessly cheap. And maybe I'll get that bookshelf I've been intending to pick up for a while.
NB: Edited a paragraph for clarity days later. Didn't change meaning.
This draft of Bird of Dusk so far is 126,291 words. That is... actually, about 30k less than I thought it was.
This is really good news, considering that over the last few years, more and more agents have been refusing to take anything much over 120k.
Granted, with somewhere in the vicinity of 16k to go (This last number is an admitted guesstimate), I'm still currently too long.
And I only carved serious wordage out of the first half, to the tune of something like 7k. The second half, I've edited less often, and so I'll probably be able to cut enough and more than enough to bring the word count down.
I'm still having a bugger of a time coming up with a query that isn't either a paragraph too short and vague to use (Which I think is also the killer in the Raising the Storm query currently out - so many places say to keep it as short as possible, so I do, then I read successful queries that are three or five times the length), or too darn long. I was trying that tonight; it felt like the thing to do.
However, tomorrow I suspect begins with a quest for a new keyboard. In removing a key beside the space bar to get rid of a specific bit of terrible gunk, I seem to have actually done something to the space bar. (You don't want to know how many times I had to go back and add spaces in this post.)
I type too hard as it is; having to slam down hard to get a space... agh.
But not only is this keyboard probably already the host to far too many horrors, I've also rubbed off the letters e, a, s, c,v,n,m, and half the d and o. And the arrow keys are vanishing.(And not actually attached anymore; the arrow left regularly flies to the floor.)
Fortunately, my taste in keyboards is shamelessly cheap. And maybe I'll get that bookshelf I've been intending to pick up for a while.
NB: Edited a paragraph for clarity days later. Didn't change meaning.
