Finished

[jacey]

I managed to finish the first draft of Spider on the Web after prevaricating for a couple of weeks over the last two chapters. There are one or two things that happened in the final showdown which surprised me and which I had to hurriedly ret-con earlier in the text, but by and large folks ended up where they were supposed to.

I know there are still some things I need to change, but for now I probably need to just leave it and let it settle for a week ot two. It's come in at 117,000 words and I was intending it to be no more than 100,000, so I'll be thinking very carefully about attacking it with pruning shears.

It's definitely the most gritty and adult book I've ever tackled. Whether it's too coarse/explicit or not remains to be seen. It's not porn-level explicit, but it is a fantasy book and there's an optimum level of expectation from fantasy readers that it would be well to take note of.
:-)

Comments

[green-knight.livejournal.com]

Yay draft. Can't comment on the eplicitness thing - it all depends on so much - execution, reader expectations...

[birdsedge.livejournal.com]

It's the execution I'm a bit worried about because the explicitness comes from characters who are not particularly refined in their language. Marek is a soldier who's risen above the normal expectations of someone from his (peasant-farmer) class because he's damn good at his job, Ani is a prostitute and Lind is a lad who was apprenticed to a blacksmith at the age of eleven and had a really bad childhood. None of them are going to be delicate in their choice of language. They think in four letter words. I can time it down n problem, but I want to see what the first readers make of it as it is first. I might be worrying about nothing.

brownnicky has offered to read it for me. She's getting the raw version. When I get her comments I'll look at it again, do a bit more editing and ask for a few beta-readers on my flist and on rasfc.

That's the plan.

[klwilliams.livejournal.com]

Good for you!

[merriehaskell.livejournal.com]

Yay draft!

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

Fantasy is getting grittier, and that's no bad thing.
Well done!

[birdsedge.livejournal.com]

I feel like I've been through the wringer - there were some nasty scenes in there which were gruelling to write - but I think it has a satisfactory outcome for the survivors. They mostly get what they need, if not what they want.

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

Prevaricating or procrastinating? I can do both on a manuscript . . .

[birdsedge.livejournal.com]

Both at once? I'm impressed.
;-)
But actually I did both, too.

I was defionitely prevaricating on this one, though, because there were things I knew I had to give to my reader, but tried to avoid. Once I realised that I couldn't avoid writing them I stopped both prevaricating and procrastinating and finished the damn thing in a day and a half - having dawdled since February.

I wrote most of this under NaNoWriMo conditions in November and the last 40,000 words have come in fits and starts since then.

[maeve-the-red.livejournal.com]

Well done. Gritty is the only way forward for fantasy (like I'd know...).