Exciting stuff, I have way more words than a novel of reasonable size needs! They all adhere to a common theme, and work towards a general storyline. It's just that...everything is too wordy, do I'm nowhere I thought I'd be in terms of plot -- all those words and I'm barely maybe a third way into the first novel. It does open more avenues for me to shape it up better, but slogging through tens of thousands of words and rearranging them into a fun, coherent book is a chore that's not as fun as writing the original stuff.
The cool thing about all of this is I keep discovering more content tucked inside various folders and files and locations across my various devices. This afternoon, I discovered 8K words worth of writing that I had completely forgotten about, and as I read it I was like, wow that's some good stuff I'm so glad I didn't lose. Funny stuff.
In any case, I probably need to write another 20-25k before I can start seriously editing anything, because all of the written chapters are only creating context and there's no sense of stake anywhere yet. The reader needs to care about the characters in one way or the other, and what happens to your protagonist or others has to have impact on the future events of the books. As things are right now, a lot of characters (almost all, actually) are disposable, make an appearance in a chapter or two to never show up again.
So I guess the next round of writing is going to involve bringing back those one-off characters and having them matter, and have them interact with other characters like them. Also need to establish those characters through 'grapevine', using a character to reference a different character, so there's a mesh of relationships and not just transactional robotic dialogs and interactions.
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