Two Pictures

What's up?

I'll tell you. In the past 3 days since starting the blog I have written 5585, 1885 and 2290 words respectively. It usually starts out in the same way. I find myself sitting behind the computer with the plot of that chapter in front of me. Then I go to the fleshed out plot of the chapter (a 2-3 page walk-through, touching specific pieces of dialogue, thoughts and/or actions) and I write within that document. I look at each paragraph and then write it out, deleting a little, but usually adding a lot more. Especially dialogue eats up a lot of space. But that's good right?

And see, that's my problem: I have a tendency to want to include everything. This explains the variance between amount of words each day. I obviously write less when I am researching places, history, names and other stuff. But any way you look at it, at the end of the day I have written pages upon pages and I still feel I'm rushing through things. I have this continuous dread that our book is going to be 1000 pages thick. I need to know how many words Harry Potter or even Lord of the Rings is. Does anybody know? This would be a good indicator for me, as I am trying to write the next big milestone in young adult/fantasy reading and although with the amount of other material available on the market I'm still not sure if I can convince a publisher to push a first time writer with his first book if it weighs more than the reader. ^_^

How to balance fitting enough in the story to have it make sense to the characters and the reader, while not overwhelming them with information that might be 'cool' or 'interesting' but not relevant to the current story line? After all, the plan is to bring out a series of five books. I wish I could give you clear examples, but I am sworn to secrecy as it would kind of ruin it all if you already knew what the story was about. So I have a better solution:


There is an adage: A picture is worth a thousand word. In that respect I could easily give you a hint of what I'm writing. I have these pictures, because actually visiting the places I'm writing about would be hard to do at the current moment. One day however I hope to travel to the places I want the characters to visit in books 2-5, and I already mostly have done so. But a fresh writers perspective can never hurt, right? Anyway, if I occasionally publish the reference material in the blog instead of telling you what it's all about you still get your appetite wet.

And I may realize I'd better release a picture coffee table book rather than a novel.