Getting to the Heart of Ice of Things

Heart of Ice

For the last while I've been carefully recreating the first three chapters of my Heart of Ice book. It was intimidating changing so much but I think the chapters are much more interesting now. I had a college professor once say that in order to write a good beginning you needed to write out the first chapter, delete the first paragraph, and you'd be left with a much more interesting beginning. In this case, I wrote the whole book, deleted the first chapter, and I do feel like it reads much better. There was a lot of exposition I thought was necessary and now I'm seeing it wasn't as necessary as I thought... hopefully. I'm currently having people read my original first three chapters and my revised three chapters to see which one readers like better. 

It was a good experience. Once I make revisions based on beta reader comments I'll start querying out the manuscript again. I'm hoping I'll be able to do that this Monday. I'm excited to get my work out there again for other people to see and hopefully want to represent. 

Designing Survival

On the book I'm currently writing front, Designing Survival, I've made it to the rising action leading sharply to the climax. I'm really liking where I'm at word count wise. I love to write big, long fantasy stories, I mean, some of my favorite books are The Lord of the Rings, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, and Eragon. They're not particularly short books. But, I also know that it would be hard putting your faith in a first time author with a giant manuscript. I want to hit the 90,000 to 110,000 fantasy debut novel length that's more common for the writer's market. 

Right now, it's looking like my book will be about 95,000 which would be perfect. The book I'm heavily editing right now, Isle of the Forsaken Gods, is at 112,000. I'll probably be able to delete enough to get it down to the suggested 110,000 words. It's kind of fun thinking about word count and things like that when it comes to writing. 

Do you prefer writing or reading longer or shorter books? Do you have any tips or tricks for writing good beginnings? Thank you so much for reading my blog. Keep dreaming and daydreaming about the beautiful worlds in your head.