First Draft—Complete!
A s of last night, I could finally say, I had completed the first draft of the rewrite of my novel! Pretty exciting stuff for me. Even though the original intent was to rewrite the entirety of the ancient first draft, it just isn't going to happen in one book. It is going to have to be split into two. Which is okay. As long as the first sells. But I'm getting way ahead of myself here. At 189,600 words, the story is too long according to publishing standards for a first time author. There are those, like Elizabeth Kostova (I'll use her as an example since her novel is also based on Vlad the Impaler), whose first time novel— The Historian —clocked out at over 200,000 words and got a pretty good chunk of change for an advance, say, the seven figure range. That doesn't mean it'll happen to me. I'm pretty sure it won't, no matter how much I fantasize over it. My chances of getting published only increase with a smaller word count. Even at 150,000 words, whic...