Here you'll find the rantings of a blogging fool and sometimes writer. My more personal posts, including progress reports on my various writing projects, are Friends Only. General posts on writing are Public. Please see my user profile for my other LJs and my friending policy, and browse through the sidebar for nifty goodies and useful info.

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Writing only leads to more writing. (Colette)

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Visitors from 1/30/05:

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From Publishers Weekly, September 26, 2005 (and yes, I'm a bit behind in my magazine reading): Gordon Dahlquist, a fairly unknown NY playright (and certainly unknown to me) sold a 1,300-page manuscript to Bantam. The "sprawling fantasy epic," called The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters, is scheduled to be published in October 2006. The two-book deal is for $2 million. As before, I'm wishing they'd given the word count.

For those of you who don't read comments or at least not the comments that aren't in answer to your comments, may I present an answer from the author of this book, himself, left as a comment on the previoius post about this book.

"Yes, well, picture my head bobbing like your mood alien when I heard Anne say, "So, is there more...?"

Word count: 485,000.

Best,
Paul Anderson,
author, Hunger's Brides."

So now we know. 485,000 words. Sounds even more impressive that way. Word count is such a writerly measurement, much better than page count.

It's long been known that if you write a good book, length won't matter when selling it to a publisher, not if they think it's good enough that people will buy it. And certainly over the years, there have been a lot of long books, within SF/F and without. But Hunger's Brides by Paul Anderson, weighing in at 1,360 pages and nearly 5 pounds (no, I haven't seen a word count and I sure would love to know it — can you picture his word count meter?) must be a record for a first novel.

Now, I've heard about this book. From NY Times Online, which seems to not need a password, since I got on fine when I clicked a link on Blog of a Bookslut:

"After generally good reviews, the book won the top prize for literary fiction at the Alberta Book Awards. Random House Canada sold its entire first press run of 5,000 copies and has gone back to press.

Carroll & Graf has printed 10,000 copies, and the book received starred reviews in Library Journal and Kirkus Reviews and is on the September recommended list of BookSense, a trade group representing independent bookstores."

But what really got me was this:

"When Mr. Anderson - a Calgary, Alberta, resident, who worked on the book for 12 years - submitted his 1,000-page manuscript, Ms. Collins had one piece of advice for him: Make it longer.

"What was missing was something that I knew he already knew was missing," Ms. Collins explained - the leap into what, from her childhood or whenever, haunted Sor Juana and eventually forced her into her vow of silence. "I told him, 'You can't not go there.' And that's how it got longer."

Not only is my mind bloggling, it's reeling and rocking, too. And I'm not that energetic. I just wanted to see my mood alien bounce.