by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
I have very, very high standards for my writing. I once read a young woman’s copy and was taken aback by how good it was from a mechanical point of view but how….meh….it was otherwise. She wrote clean, smooth copy that just did not really inspire me very much.
Given how many novels she’s finished relative to me, don’t quite know what to think. And, really, she in real terms has a much better chance of one day selling her novel than I do.
You see, I am a good-to-great storyteller, but my spelling and grammar can at times be can so bad that some people get really upset. In large part this comes from I just can’t properly see subtle bad grammar — sometimes, when it’s staring straight at me. That I ever tried to be a copy editor is rather comical in hindsight.
Anyway. The key thing I have to keep an eye on word count on this novel. I’m shooting for no more than 140,000 words. Anything more than that and I may have to split the thing into two. There remains a structural problem whereby the murder that sets off the story happens way too late in the game — the end of first / beginning of second act.
But as I’ve mentioned before, so many interesting things happen in the first act that I think there is at least a chance that readers won’t really notice that delay in the murder all that much.
