Well, it's been six years writing a novel, 146 pages or so. I want it to be 160 pages. I have these pages already written but they're not "organized". The words in these pages are more like draft and it doesn't have an ending. I have an idea in my head, but I'm not so sure about it. I've been on and off with the writing of the novel, since I also write lyrics for songs, poems and write instrumentals for indie/rock songs. I also paint and draw, so there's too much I don't want to leave behind with the little time I have. Anyhow, so, I wrote these pieces of the novel that includes a musician, and I love this character so much that I wrote 53 lyrics for songs for this guy. I cannot fit that much material into the novel I'm writing now, cause it won't fit that well into the story, so I thought of makind a "spin-off" novel about the musician. Still all I've written about that "sin-off" are the words for the songs. I've got some ideas in my head, and somebody (after reading the character's songs) suggested me to write the "spin-off" a la Shakespeare, cause the way the words are written give that kind of feeling/style. Anywho, I just wanted to share how I exited I am about this whole "project", and apologize if I wrote typos or misspells, cause English isn't my first language. Thanks for reading this and have a nice day! And yeah BTW; you may ask yourself what's the novel about...? It's a Christian Horror story about creatures from hell who hide themselves through dark literature in books, and once these books are being read, they become real in that person's life.
Congrats on completing the novel! You must be thrilled indeed! Your novel sounds exciting in a spooky sort of way. It brings to mind books written by Frank Peretti and Ted Dekker. I haven’t read anything by either of them of late, but they both do spooky well. (My favorite would be ‘Boneman’s Daughter’ by Dekker, maybe because it’s been several months since I read it and it still haunts me!) I think your spin-off novel sounds like a wonderful idea. All the best with that.
Sounds like an awesome plot. But your book really isn't that long. With some readjustment you could easily fit in extra material into the book. If you wanted to of course.
that's right about not long enough, unless those pages are single-spaced [mss must be double-spaced]... writing is measured by word count, not pages... so how many words does it consist of at this point?
Thanks everyone for their reply. To Marge: I know about Frank Peretti's books because a friend of mine, who's a Christian, read the first pages of my book, when it was only a draft and suggested me Frank Peretti. Still I haven't read much of his work, since I don't have that much time to read a whole book. Funny, a writer who doesn't have time to read books, eh? Well, I used to, but it's been more than a year since the last time I've finished reading one and it was a biography. That's what I like reading most; biography books, and, well, poetry books. So thanks for the suggestion. I hope to finish the "patching up" the details about the novel and post a few pages here, okay? To Ellamarie365: Thanks for the support and kind words. Hope you'd get to read the novel. To Protar: Thanks for the support and the suggestions. I was thinking of adding some more material, to make it easier to understand. Since in some parts of the plot the reader must kind of guess what it's happening because of the hints that are given. I realize that is not so easy for some people, and they can missunderstand what is really happening in the "scene". So I'm rewriting some parts and adding some more explanatory words of what's going around the characters and giving a clear picture about their feelings and thoughts. Like I said it used to be more ambiguos, but it kind of gets lost, if you know what I mean. To mammamaia: Thanks! Maybe the novel is not long enough in aspect of pages count... I'm not sure! But to tell you the truth I want to finish it for real and onto the next one. It's not that I'm getting tired or sick of it, but I think I've given it enough time of my life. It still needs a few "patches" here and there, because of the language barrier, cause, althought I speak, write and read English, it is only my 2nd language, and there are some expressions or order of sentences that escape me. But no worries, my wife is helping me with that. She grew up in the States. You asked me about word counts. Okay... it's 37,351. Thanks again to everyone who has read and replied. Take care. Have a nice day!
37k is way too short for an adult novel... 80-100k is the most preferred length for most publishers... so you'll have to do a lot of plot-expanding/writing to get it up to acceptable submission size... if there's not enough story to do that, then i suggest you put it aside and start a new one, keeping the length needs in mind...
