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Moving the Goal Posts

NY Jets - Philadelphia Eagles, Sep 2009 - 01Creative Commons License Ed Yourdon via Compfight

If you’ve been following along on my Work In Progress meter for Starveyors you might have wondered why I’m suddenly almost finished. If you look at the end goal, you’ll see that I in fact shortened the goal to 65K words.

I did this because after having written past my outline and into uncharted territory at about 58K words, it became apparent to me that this was not going to be an 80K word story. No matter how badly I milked it. So my new goal is to just get it out to 65K or at least close enough to call it good.

I doubt any major publisher will ever want to print this novel, and most people will read it as an ebook only. So sweating over the established normal length for novels is not really helping the book any. The story I wanted to tell is or is about to be told and it looks like it will be about 65K words long. I don’t feel any pressure at all to make it 80K or 100K words long. I just feel pressure to finish it. My goal is to get this draft over with by the time I leave TN on Tuesday.

I have another novel to write and other things pressuring my writing time and this first draft needs to sit for at least a few weeks to a month. So if you’ll excuse me, I have to wrap this puppy up and put it to bed.

1 thought on “Moving the Goal Posts”

  1. Had to read the full post to get the significance of the picture. At first I thought you were wasting vacation time at some football game watching pretty maidens all in a row.

    Glad to see the goal posts are finally in view. Don’t punt!

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