Timewaster's Guide Archive

THIS IS NOT AN INSULT!! Most people have little originality and spin off concepts based on works they recently read and liked. The funny thing is most people can not admit they lack originality/ creative thought (robert heinlien's character lazarus long says less than 10% of man ever has a single creative thought and he may be right) i personally believe i am in the minority but hey i may be deluding myself...

I harp all the time on originality, but truth to be told, there is no such thing as original. Someone, somewhere has done it before. In fact, a lot of “original” ideas are the reuses of old ideas in response to something else being recently over used.

I love how YA is suddenly "rinky dink" and less worthy than a book written for adults. And just so you know, 200,000 is about 2-3 YA novels.

_{My favorite book series of all time is a middle grade reader.}

 

Quote from: Frog on April 01, 2009, 09:01:41 PM

Sorry, but that spot has already been taken by a certain elf hater on this site but you come in at a close second.

Gah!  I can't even antagonize you adequately.  Is there nothing I can do to storm your impenetrable fortress here?  So...powerful!

Hey buddy, I was her archnemesis first! 

My name is Renoard or Fred, I'll likely answer to either.  Like I said on "email list", dunno if this constitutes crashing the party.  If not, then let me say that I am a Student of Divinity, ironically, in real life.  I have loved speculative fiction for more years than there has been an MTV and I dabble a bit at writing and criticism.

Mostly I'm a professional time-waster, though I haven't done the RPG thing since before D&D had Drow...

The Writing Excuses threads are fun and really helpful, so they lead me here.

Lol, you'll fit right in  

Not knowing him, I couldn't really know what to expect.    And not being the fan type I don't actually check his site with any regularity.   I read the estimates about 2 weeks ago and I read some blog entries.  I might have gotten the 750K from that.  But I'm encouraged to hear at least 300k although from the writer perspective, it seems that longer or shorter would be easier.

As for YA.  An awful lot of YA is close to 200k.  Case in point Green Riders call. I could go on but would be tedious.  90k sounds more like tweenie novels...

But I will take your encouragement and hope you are right.

You can't sell a YA novel at 200K. Most YA is between 50K and 100K.

As I told o'Froggy, it's a literary, fantasy, romance thing. 

And I do mean that seriously. Have you ever read the DRESDEN FILES by Jim Butcher? I'm on book three, and I still know very little about his world and even his magic system. He explains things only at the very last minute, once they absolutely need to be explained.

That, inconstant magic rules and cussing are the reasons I've never made it past book four. But I'm getting off topic.

I've always said just write the first draft and don't worry about info dumping. Those things can be cleaned up in the second draft. One person I asked told me that he wrote his whole first draft without explaining anything to see if alpha readers could figure it out on their own, or if he need to go in and provide information. I think that is a good system too.