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National Penuche Fudge Day 2023
Continuing on with things that I cannot possibly eat without creative intervention, today is National Penuche Fudge Day and boy does this stuff look tempting! I’ve got to talk to my brother from another mother, Enrico Longobardi, about this stuff…
Real Knowledge
Real knowledge is to know the extent of one’s ignorance. ~Confucius
What I know is that I don’t know nearly as much about the software I work on as I ought to. We didn’t have an onboarding process when I started.
Now that we do, I’ll have the opportunity to go through it with my new colleague. Should be interesting.
On the subject of writing, there’s still a ton I don’t know. I’ve been banging out chapters in earnest. The more you write, the better you get at it, theoretically.
On the subject of running a publishing business, I don’t know very much at all. There are only so many hours in the day. It’s something that I know I need to learn, but I’ll have to do a better job of time-slicing in order to learn the skills needed.
As long as we live, we continue learning. For some, it’s an active process. For others, it’s a matter of experience that occurs whether knowledge is sought or not. For me, it’s a bit of both.
Penuche Fudge
Penuche Fudge – Martha Stewart
I’m sure someone has figured out how to do sugar-free fudge, but I have no idea how that would work. It’s not all that important to me at this point.
There are plenty of delicious things for me to choose from.
In general, fudge was only an occasional treat. If I don’t get around to buying more, I can’t say I’ll miss it.
Pudding, on the other hand, that’s something I have a hard time doing without. Fortunately, there are commercially available sugar-free puddings for me to choose from when the notion strikes me.
It’s not like I’m running around eating dessert all the time. I’m actually not that hungry for much of anything at this point. On the few occasions when I want a treat, it’s nice to know I’ve got options.
More
Less is only more where more is no good. ~Frank Lloyd Wright
It’s been said that inexperienced writers have a tendency to go overboard with their manuscripts. I can identify.
To tell the story as I have conceived of it, I could easily blast out massive tomes. This is not unprecedented.
Some of my favorite works exceed the current recommended genre thresholds by a factor of two or more.
For instance, the accepted ranges for current fiction in genres from romance, thrillers, crime drama, historical fiction or fantasy runs between 40,000-120,000 overall.
On the other hand, GRRM whacked out the Song of Ice and Fire books in a range of 298,000 to 422,000 words. Y’all, that’s between triple and quadruple the recommended genre word counts.
I’m not sure how he managed to get that through his publisher’s editors.
The thing is, I read the hell out of those books.
Despite the widely accepted genre thresholds, I and millions of others were absolutely entranced by Martin’s massive tomes. His weren’t the only massive tomes I’ve enjoyed.
Professor Tolkien did about half again the recommended threshold. Frank Herbert was nearly double the genre count for Dune. Tolstoy’s War and Peace has over half a million words.
Okay, I’m not so eminent a writer as any of these authors, but there’s something to be said for not constraining one’s writing to arbitrary guidelines.
So, how does one qualify for the extended word count? I’ll let you know when I find out.
You could say it takes what it takes. If Brandon Sanderson can readily publish works in the 200,000 word range, then it’s not a hard and fast rule.
One can excuse classic authors such as Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, Leo Tolstoy and Victor Hugo for cranking out epic tomes of a quarter million to a half million words in their eras, but if modern authors like George R. R. Martin and Brandon Sanderson can crank out epic tomes then why can’t we?
Well, having observed that, there are a number of authors whose works I enjoy who keep their books between 70,000 and 80,000 words. These books are tremendously engaging, so one need not go on at extraordinary length to get a story done.
So, I suppose the answer is that less is more unless there’s more to be said. I also suppose that if I would ever want my work to be done cinematically, I’d want to keep it tight and quick.
Honestly, I’m not sure that really want to keep The Sentinels tight and quick. I find that the Holiday Season Serial Romances are better suited to that end.
I feel that my Sentinels series should be every bit as voluminous as any Dickens, Tolstoy or Martin epic. I can see the Tales Of Olde Auringia or the Far-Flung Reaches conforming to genre standards, but I’m thinking that The Sentinels should be however epic they wind up being.
I guess we’ll see. There are a few structural approaches I can take that would adjust the series. My thought was to have it as a thirteen book series, spanning from the time when Tanda joins the team in 2005 to just before A Misfit Christmas. Who knows? Maybe I’ll do those as 120,000-150,000 word novels or I’ll figure out how to pare down a core narrative and put the other stories I want to tell as attendant works in the milieu.
Who knows? Right now, I just need to get through the thing and see how it shapes up in editing.
Tons to do today. I hope you’re getting some rest this weekend. I won’t be…