Sunday, March 27, 2011

First draft of Hild is finished

I finished the first draft of the first volume of my novel about Hild. It's huge: 976 pages (more than 200,000 words). I'll lose a lot of that in the rewrite, of course, but it will still be long.

Submitted as proof:

Photo taken with crapcam (sorry about that). It turns out that 976 pages is nearly 11cm (4.5 in) high and weighs north of 4 kilos (>9 lbs).

Why all the detail? So I can avoid actually beginning the rewrite...

6 comments:

Kate said...

Hearty congratulations!What an achievement! Rock on!

nicola said...

Kate, thank you!

Jonathan Jarrett said...

Wow, congratulations! I hope I never write anything that long, and I mean that in a good way if you see what I mean; what a labour completed! May the rewrite be easy and the results satisfying.

nicola said...

Jonathan, I know exactly what you mean. The length of this draft is insane.

The second draft is where I turn a bunch of events (and the beginnings of an ethnography of the early 7th century...) into a real story, a novel. Fun in a different way.

I love my job :)

esmeraldamac said...

That's an impressive pile of paper! I do love Whitby, and the seventh century, so I'm really looking forward to seeing it in the book shop...

nicola said...

esmeraldamac, my guess would be late next year or perhaps early 2013. Publishing proceeds glacially.