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Update 12-27-13
As you may have gathered, Children of Pride was not ready for Christmas, as I had at one time hoped. It will almost surely be available some time in January. I’m just waiting for my crack design team to finish work on the cover, and I’d much rather wait a bit and get something we all like than try to rush the process. Creativity tends to work on its own schedule, no matter how much one might wish it were otherwise.
In other news, this morning I passed the 55,000 word mark on the first draft of The Devil’s Due, the sequel to Children of Pride. I’m having fun with this one, getting to show a little more of how magic works in the Wonder as well as some of the differences between the magic of the fae, little folk, and even human wizards and witches. I think those who enjoy Children of Pride (current count: one teenager and three very supportive editors/beta readers) will appreciate how the story expands in this second installment.
Too Much? Not Enough?
Ever since this summer, I’ve been a smidge worried about the word count of Children of Pride. Chalk it up to my day job as an editor: I want the text to fit the space allotted, neither (terribly) too much nor (terribly) too little. My first novel looked a tad sparse when compared to the massive tomes my daughter usually reads!
So I was pleased to find this three-year-old post by Jacqui Murray about Word Count by Genre. It provides a basic rule of thumb for the desired word counts for various genres—yay!—and then goes on to list word counts for several famous novels—double yay!
Oh, and apparently I’m a worry wart. Children of Pride weighs in somewhere between The Adventures and Tom Sawyer (69,066) and Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (77,325). So we’re good to go. 🙂
Rounding Third
Children of Pride has come home from the final outside reader, road-weary but grateful for the experience. Meanwhile, my illustrator is working on the cover. If real life will cooperate, the book may yet be available by Christmas! Here is the blurb:
Taylor Smart has a pretty good life despite her mean teachers and snooty classmates. Of course, that is before she is kidnapped by the Fair Folk and whisked into a world she never dreamed could be real.
Apparently, the cuddly versions of those old faery tales don’t tell the whole story, and middle school never prepared Taylor for a world filled with bogeymen, trolls, dwarves, and spriggans. But that’s what she finds in the faery realm its inhabitants call the Wonder.
Taylor is thrown into a quest to discover her true identity guided by Danny Underhill, her erstwhile kidnapper. But will the shapeshifting trickster’s dark secrets spell her doom? And how will Taylor decide which world, fae or human, is truly her own?
Names
I appreciated Carl Sinclair’s post today about names in fantasy fiction. Some writers seem to love filling their fantasy worlds with awesome (if improbable) names for people, places, and things. Tolkien made a cottage industry of it—and inspired generations of writers who simply don’t have the linguistic chops to pull it off! Carl’s point that some (many?) such writers go overboard is well taken.
In Children of Pride, most characters, places, and things have names that are quite at home in the English language. This was something of a challenge, as the story deals with people and things that were often given their names centuries ago both in Gaelic, Cornish, or some other actual language or in Esrana, a constructed language that plays a tiny role in the unfolding of the story. Plenty of originally-foreign names became blatantly Anglicized (Gaelic Áine became Anya) or, in once instance, Gaelicized-then-Anglicized (Muskogee Rvne Rofke became Dunhoughkey) for ease of pronunciation.
Left to my own devices, I would probably have made things more complicated than they are. I am, however, dealing with fantasy in a contemporary setting and aiming the story at younger readers. I appreciated the constraint that provided, and my beta readers and I are fairly pleased with the results.
Darrell J. Pursiful 