edit finished!

The latest edit of AfterQuest is finished. Now I'll send it to my continuity checker, then hopefully the beta readers will have finished Taarwysha and I can interest them in AfterQuest.

Ever since I first finished this thing, I've been working on the best description of it. With four main characters, it's been hard trying to tie it all together succinctly. If I break them apart, it's easier (if a little tonge-in-cheek).

For Elsie: Girl meets Elf, girl loved Elf, girl loses Elf. Elf gets girl back.
For Kenny: Football player learns to be swordsman, saves the city, and gets the girl.

The query 'hook' I'm currently playing with focuses more on Elsie since she goes through the biggest changes in the book and it starts out:

Like a real-life Alice or Dorothy, Elsie Conners was in a strange land without a way home, only stories of a device that used to exist. She's with three other Humans in a city of Elves with a Troll invasion imminent. The Elves tell Elsie she has the ability for telepathic communication used by a handful of Elves and agrees to be trained while they search for the way home. She falls in love with a telepathic Elf and is in mental contact with him when he is attacked in a jungle ambush. Dazed and depressed, she continues to help the Elven council during the final days of the battle and the four Humans are sent home.

Back at home, she persuades her parents that she is fit to return to school, hoping to reunite with the others who'd been in the Elven city with her, hoping they might be the key to returning to a normal life.

It needs something more. I'm hoping I can get beta readers to tell me what struck them as the main plot points so I can emphasize those points in the hook.

under 150K!

I finished cutting and pasting AfterQuest back together today. My goal was to get it under 150K, preferably in the 120K range -- I still have the last third or so to polish and the word count is 128,623!. Using the character count divided by 5 method, it's even shorter: 117,000. I tried wrapping my mind around whether that means my average words are longer or shorter than 5 letters and gave up. I probably use 'the' a lot. And Elves have long names.

Back to polishing - maybe I can cut another thousand words or so....

Novel as Puzzle

Queries and Synopsis are hard, no one disputes that. They force the writer to boil the story down to the bare essentials. After finishing a story, I set them aside, make a few editing passes, then try to write a coherent query letter, submit it, rewrite it, submit it again, rewrite it again, more submissions, then start looking at the flaws in the plot.

AfterQuest was too long. I knew that. My last editing pass had the goal of under 150k words. I think I was going to make it, but before reaching 'the end', I started the edit over. One chance remark by one of my test readers (OK, so there's only one who's finished reading it) led me to changing the internal chronology of the story which would lead to the cutting of thousands of words (one cut scene, which I'd like to post here, is 7000 words).

So now, I'm flipping back and forth through the 'sacrificial' copy of the story to get the scenes, content, and dialogue into the new story and in the correct order. Complicating things - AfterQuest starts after the main characters return from an adventure in the other dimension and alternates chapters of the 'present' with chapters of the adventure a few months past. By changing the time they arrive in the other world, I hope to speed things up (now they arrive less than a week before the city is attacked) and keep them from getting comfortable there.

I tried using 3x5 cards when I started this process and stacked them up with the content that would make new chapters and set aside the chapters that would be cut. It kind of worked, but would have worked better if I'd included more details per chapter card.

Once it's done, I'll get back to the next query letter and resume the submit, reject, revise, submit... process.