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Saturday, July 19, 2008

And We Come to the End!

No, I'm not going anywhere. BUT I did write the magical words, "The end" today at the end of my manuscript of Starcaster.

WooHoo!
(happy dance time)

(BTW, I never would have finished this quickly if it had not been for my Neo.)

I've gone through most of the book at least three times now, and rewrote the sorry excuse of an ending that I had before. For this ending, it's Tory alone against her nemesis, with a nice gun battle. Oddly enough for a fantasy, there is no magic used during the ending at all, although there was an abortive attempt to use magic. The magic system in Starcaster is extremely limited.

And, the finished draft is only 85,000 words! That gives me a lot of room for fleshing out, because fantasy novels are often over 100,000 words. This is a new thing for me. For each of the previous novels, I ended up having to cut. This time, I'm definitely going to have to expand. The ending is decidedly sketchy. Even so, I don't see going much over 90,000 words. I hope that doesn't turn out to be a drawback!

I hope to be querying by the end of October at the latest. I can't wait to try to write the synopsis. That ought to be a BLAST.

Yay!

7 comments:

  1. Congratulations, Tia!!! It's such a wonderful feeling to come to the end. ;) I'm glad you've been liking the Neo. I think I'm going to have to try one of those.

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  2. Congratulations, Tia!

    Dare I remind you it's now time for some edits?

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  3. No, Robin. The word is LOVE. The Neo is quirky, but so extremely useful. I'm thinking of sending a letter to the manufacturer suggesting some features that would be useful for a novelist. (RTF file format being a big item on that list.)

    And Susan, I've already started the edits! I'm just so excited about it I had to jump right in!

    Thanks, everyone!

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  4. Congrats, Tia. I love the feeling when I get to the end of my novel. So liberating.

    I don't know about anyone else, but I love doing edits more so than the actual draft. That's when all the good stuff comes out for me.

    Best of luck on your query journey.

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  5. This is actually the third draft, but I had discarded a previous major conflict resolution and needed to rewrite it from scratch. After I had done so, I was able to close the other plot threads and draw it out to the end for the first time.

    I'm going to post my lessons learned for this novel. There are a lot of them!

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  6. Woo hoo fellow July 19th finisher!

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  7. Are you being series that you enjoy writing they synopsis?

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