Every so often on social media I’ll encounter a post that seems wholly and deliberately written for me.

In the four years since I last put fingers to keys in support of this blog, I’ve sadly yet to overcome my tendency to put fingers to keys in far too great an amount to be of service to the accepted length of a standard traditionally published novel.

That is to say, I remain, as ever, an overwriter.

In the 180K(!) words of my latest historical WIP’s first draft that I’ve laboriously written (because I find all writing laborious, really, rather than this being some special case), there is, fortunately, a natural endpoint where I can cut the story into two.

But cutting in two is not the same thing as cutting in half. With my new, proper midpoint as a guidepost, I now have to remove at least 15K words from the first half of book 1 and add 8K to the second half to rebalance the plot structure.

Oh, and the so-called “book 2” I now have on my hands? It’s less than half the length of a normal novel.

Story math, y’all.

But I have a plan for this. I have a complicated, multi-phase plan to fix all of these challenges I’ve both inadvertently and inevitably created for myself. I may have even finally—finally—learned my lesson on proper story structure and pacing during the drafting stage.

But what a road it’s been—it still is, currently—to get here.

~

The reality of how long it’s been since I’ve last had a completed first draft to push and pull into shape is itself another wrinkle of story math resulting from the two key facts I mentioned above—that I’m an overwriter and that all writing is laborious to me. Even blogging. Yet here I am. Again. Maybe…. For now, I’m just dipping my toe back into the blogosphere. No committed posting schedule. No comments either, for now. We’ll see how this—how all of this—goes in due course.

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