I wouldn’t stress overly much on exact word counts. The right number of words to tell a story is the number of words that tells the story. The trick, of course, is figuring out exactly what story you’re attempting to tell, and neither digressing from it nor leaving it incomplete.

Both Cassie and myself went and are fascinated with the information, the ideas, and the example.

One of the books that he’s putting out this year is called Dead Six. This dude (Mike) was writing some fiction on a gun oriented forum, and Larry asked if he could add stuff from the point of view of a different character in the story. They went back and forth and eventually got over 100k words written in the story. Cleaned up and edited, that’s one of the books by Larry (and Mike) that Baen is putting out this year.

On Larry’s blog, he’s got some stuff up about hints for writers, links found at this link under Writing Related. The How To Get Published # 10 might be of particular interest at this time…

For those interested in the very rough draft of Dead Six (with lots of comments from the peanut gallery) it can be found at this link.

Back on point, a lot of formal English training is overrated – a reasonable chunk of what gets taught in schools is flat out wrong (often due to a particular regional dialect being blessed as the “right” way to do things at some point in the past, when it was really just one dialect amongst many).

Language truly is a “learn by doing” activity, initially by reading broadly, and then by actually *writing* (as you do yourself, and admirably encourage others to do as well). That’s not to say there’s *nothing* to be learned from formal training, but browsing around the Stack Exchange for English would probably point a writer in the right direction more often than a lot of the so-called Style Manuals would.

I just thought it was hilariously written with an arrogant and condescending assumption that I somehow wasn’t aware of what editing was, or how it should be used.

We’re editing my Converging Forces stuff now, right now as it happens. We’re working our butts off, Cassie and I, to begin transforming it from a series of isolated chapters written in varying degrees of tenses and roughly hewn logs of words into something approaching a cohesive whole. And along the way, my shortcomings in spelling and grammar are being addressed.

Just speaking for myself, I think I do arright for not having ever had anything but the most basic education in english. My son is already past where my own education in writing ended, and he’s eight. Cassie just told me that she’s gonna have Alex sit me down and teach me how to use the apostraphe, since he has it down and I don’t. And thats undoubtedly an accurate statement. I just haven’t let that kind of thing worry me at all, not for stuff written fast and published for a limited group of friends.

Everyone I know that has read the series also considers OotP to be the weakest of the 7 books. Still, being the weakest of that particular series leaves plenty of room for it to be pretty damn good :)

I do like the quote they started with though. It would actually be kinda cool if you did two versions – the current 100k+ word version, and then another where you’ve gone through the whole thing with a razor slicing out everything that you no longer consider essential, based on what appears later in the text. One of my favourite author stories is from a Q&A session with Richard Morgan here in Brisbane, where he talked about going over and doing a full re-edit of Altered Carbon when it kept getting rejected by publishers – even he liked the final version better than the version he had originally been submitting.

Of course, if *you* don’t think carving through the text to create the abridged version would be a fun thing to do, then why would you take the time?

By streamlined, I meant that I have been consciously trying to do as little scenery description as possible; I’ve tried to set the stage with some touches to give an impression, and then shift focus to the people, their thoughts, and their actions. When face to face in pen and paper role playing, I love to give lavish descriptions of the environment so people know what tehy have in the short term to use or be aware of, but I’m intentionally going minimalistic on description here.

By fast paced, again, I’m trying to focus on the characters’ thoughts, understanding, intention, action, and resulting reaction. I am hoping that what you walk away with from the story are some memories of what the characters thought and did, and are perhaps left with a vague feeling that, okay they were in the forest for this bit, then the mountains, then they rode hard to a keep.

I also hope that I’m spreading out the background and setting enough that it seeps in and becomes part of the flow, rather than something that you have to think about. That’s one of the reasons I’m trying like hell to NOT use fancy made up names and terms for things like magic or the soul or the process of what loremasters do. What I’m doing might be the wrong way to go, but at least I’m screwing up on purpose instead of because I didn’t know better.

In the end, this first book is setting a number of themes and groundwork for a shitload of story, and I really want it to feel simple and easily understood, erring on TOO easily understood, so when shit starts building up and rolling downhill nobody gets lost wondering where the hell THAT came from. Much.