CUTTING BACK ON THE BULK

As I have mentioned in one of my previous posts, an agent gave me some wonderful advice that I just can't pass up on. She mentioned that one of the biggest problems she had with my sample chapters was the very high word count. It was about 145 000 words. The other problem was that certain scenes read as if though I am just dumping information on the reader.

To me that is nothing but good news. A bulky manuscript I can fix, but if she mentioned that I lacked imagination and execution of my idea then I would have been screwed. I have to go back to my first novel and see what I can omit from my manuscript. That is always the hard part for me. Because I think every scene should be in there. As I have mentioned before, my first novel is the first of a planned series, so one solution is ending the book at an earlier chapter and adding the remaining chapters to the second book, which by the way I finished last week. Second option is removing selected scenes from the book.

I originally labeled my book as paranormal romance, but I am even considering including or changing it to the Urban Fantasy genre. I am also aiming to scale it down to at least 115 000-120 000 words. It is still a bit high I know but it is an improvement over the original 145 000 words. I have no idea how I would make my novel work with only 100 000 words. So I have to make those changes before I start querying again.