Believe it or not, I've written a novel. It's an high-fantasy, epic tale about a small group of adventurers trying to make the world a better place despite some long odds. If you just read that slugline, you probably translated "high-fantasy" to "imaginary" and "epic" into "too long." Both of those substitutions are probably accurate.

Now that I'm onto the proofreading stage, I've been trying to decide what to do with my book and I've discovered something horrifying: it's too long. Most writing guides I've been consulting have been blunt in stating that for me to have a realistic chance to find a publisher, my novel needs to be under 100,000 words. Mine currently has about 170,000. Oops.

The good news is that the story really has two distinct parts. If I stop the word count in between, I get about 110,000 for the first half. That's good. I could even edit that down a little and get it smaller. That's better. Maybe I've got a diamond hiding somewhere inside all those pages.

The real problem becomes what to do about the second half to make it long enough that I end up with two equal parts. Given that my problem so far has been that I'm too wordy, this probably isn't as big a problem as I think it is. I'll just have to add some new misadventures for my characters to bumble through.

I'll let you know when I'm ready to release the book to the public. If you buy a copy, I promise you'll get your money's worth. It's guaranteed to contain a whole bunch of words.

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