by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
It’s times like these when I wince at how much time I’ve wasted on this novel that could have been avoided if I had a wife or a girlfriend. I’ve finally come up with a solution I’ve used before — splitting the story into two books with the first book being a cliffhanger — and now it’s beginning to sink in what a fast read I’ve come up with. This is a solution I suspect a wife or a girlfriend would have suggested years ago.
The first book uses the Hero as the protagonist and the second book uses the Heroine as the protagonist. This is something that wasn’t clear when it was just one big book.
It was size that force my hand on splitting the story in two. I was all excited that I was at the midpoint of the novel when I looked at the scene count and realized the whole thing was just too long — 200 scenes. Even if you were charitable and said not every scene would be 1,000 words, that still probably would have gotten me to about 160,000 words which is just too long.
So, I decided to again split the story in two. Now, I’m going to be far closer to the “sweet spot” of 100,000 words and have some wiggle room to get to maybe 120,000 or 130,000 words so I can flesh out characters more.
I’m actually beginning to do the reading I need to do in order to flesh characters out, but it’s slow going. They say if you have time to write you have time to read and that’s what’s driving me to read more.
Anyway, I’m very pleased with the state of the two novels, one story right now. I keep struggling with how I could make this a trilogy, but the only way I can think of is to make one of the books a prequel that would explore the extremely well-thought-out backstory to this universe I’ve come up with. In fact, I could actually write two prequels, but that’s something I would only do if the first two novels in the series were a huge success and there was obviously some interest in seeing all this stuff only previously alluded to.
