It is done, it is written! The new fantasy book is complete!
I did it. The brand new (yet old) 63-chapter, 160,000-word fantasy book featuring magic, dragons, wizards, gritty heroes, and lots and lots of lore is done. I finished the project within roughly six months of leisurely writing (for the most part), give or take a few weeks. On its own, this wouldn’t be a major feat, except … I have tried to “rewrite” this idea three times already, unsuccessfully. But now, I finally succeeded.
The original “old” manuscript was a book I wrote some 25 years ago, badly wrote at that, with a whooping 650K word count. It was, for the lack of a better word, cumbersome. But the basic storyline was solid. The lack of literary “perfection” bothered me. This was my first proper “big” fantasy novel, and yet, it wasn’t good enough for any sort of publication.
Over the years, I pondered what to do. The general advice is, don’t bother with the old stuff, write new stuff. It makes sense. Trying to fix an utterly broken piece of work is a lot of wasted effort, at the end of the day. And yet, I made this cardinal mistake, twice. I thought I could simply trim down the old mega-manuscript to something more manageable. In essence, the book needed a proper slimming. Roughly 75-80% of the text was just unneeded, as it didn’t add anything to the story or characterization.
Well, eventually, I abandoned these prettification attempts. I decided to reuse the idea, but write everything from scratch. Every single word. And it worked. The writing flowed. Now, the manuscript is 10x tighter, faster, more elegant. There are fewer plot holes, there’s much better pacing, the characters are more varied and human-like, they have depth and flaws and difficult moral choices. There’s more background, more lore, more history, the world feels more genuine. And there’s a lot more happening, despite it being just one quarter (even less) in length. This is, I’m convinced, a really nice book.
I enjoyed writing. I didn’t hurry things, I didn’t pressure myself. I let my brain spew ideas, mulled about them some, then put them into writing. I had a sudden rush on inspiration toward the end. I wrote some 30,000 words in about three weeks, and the last 15,000 words in just three days. And now, I can proudly say, I finally managed to complete this difficult project. It only took me 25 years, but hey, who’s counting.
See you around. There’s a whole avalanche of new ideas and topics and book projects coming your way! I will announce these in the coming weeks. Take care.