Finally the First Draft

Festival Madness is now a completed manuscript. I finished writing the first draft at 12:30 this morning. And finally, the exciting climax is actually exciting. Almost anything can be fixed. Almost.

The manuscript is 534 pages of Courier New 12, with a birthweight of a hefty 104,419 words, of which I will need to cut about 4419 or 8.275 words per page if you are into numbers. Cutting 8 words a page is not such a fearsome challenge. Now cutting 40,000 or 50,000 words is a feat. I cut great swathes through The Shadow Warriors and World of Mirrors, so a small swath does not intimidate.

One of my old writing instructors, Michael Levin, once said to put everything into your first draft because it is easier to cut than to think up scenes to add.

There is some polite controversy about word count in my writing group. A traditional Agatha Christie type mystery may only have 65,000 - 85,000 words, whereas a mainstream mystery (which is what I write) can easily have 125,000. But I like to keep them slimmer. A so-called mainstream mystery is one that people who don't ordinary read mysteries would read, and of course one hopes that the dyed in the wool mystery readers will read it, too.

Actually, what one hopes is that the book will be published. And reviewed. Reviewed well. And that readers will buy it and like it and ask when the next one will be out.

So now I turn to Proust, to Southern California in the late twenties, to working on my web page and writing a few short stories. My first task, on Thursday is to give a speech about writing crime fiction. The title of the speech is "A Man with a Gun Comes Through the Door." Cool, yes?

Onward,

Grapeshot

When did I start liking numbers? When I latched onto computers.