Over the last two weeks, I’ve finally started in on a project that’s arguably long overdue: a complete, tear-down rewrite of my first completed novel, still provisionally titled The Shadow of the Ruin. The first manuscript was written between January 2013 and August 2018, at a staggering 222,500 words. A partial rewrite, aiming primarily at…
(Or how to tell if you’re writing too much description.) A lot of things have evolved about my writing since I started out, but my recent project of entirely rewriting my first manuscript to cut more than 50,000 words from its total length has forced me to focus on one of those areas in particular.…
Recently, I had been forced to accept a reality that I had struggled to deny: my manuscript – my beloved, carefully crafted work of six years – was overweight. At two hundred and twenty-three thousand words, it might have passed easily as the work of an established name in the fantasy genre – but debut…