i did a word count for my sci-fi epic

Post Reply New Topic

half a million words

thats not bad, eh? :I

i must say i was surprised, split in 5 books tho, roughly 100+ in first 4, and 75K in the last which is a short story collection.

best part is, for myself, while i am polishing and correcting, i am also removing dullness, so... to ME at least all of it has a nice steady flow. perfection is the game! before i even THINK about publishers and their opinions, ALL grammar errors must go, no, no, no, and maximize norwegianisation, cant have any too-much-online stuff w english sneaking in.

i have also decided:
i dont give a s**t about the opinions of others, as long as i get it out into stores for people to get it. if theres at least 2 people world wide who loves it, then i love them back
also its in norwegian, ha-ha to everyone. i have no idea what it takes to have something translated, how much worship you need to gather, so im not really thinking about it. im barely thinking about publishing as a real possibility, apart from it being an inevitable goal for this project

that makes it more epic than lord of the rings btw inwordcount

altho i didnt touch "dark lords" any, i DID explode several stars, vaporizing many worlds. plus dropped a moon onto a world, thats pretty epic. theres also an exploding neutrol star, with space heroes fighting it out on the pieces of star-debris flying through space.
i have to say, thats pretty damn epic! with other star-chunks flying past, in the background.

neutron stars are epic, cus you can, theoretically, walk on them

oh and theres a quasar and a black hole, just to have included them, but they dont do much

Congratz on getting so much written. My Aspie wife is jealous (She has several professional short story sales, but no books)

If you want to get published, you need to make connections. Attend AissieCon/World Con 68 (http://www.aussiecon4.org.au/). There is also Finncon (http://www.finncon.org/) and Ropecon (http://www.ropecon.fi/index.php) if you don't want to travel as far. Aspies tend to do well in at SF writer conventions (weird is the norm)

You may want to join an on-line critique group. Critters is a good example (http://www.critters.org/), but there are many more out there.

The net popped up a SF/Fantasy writers group that meets in Stortorvets Gjæstgiveri, Stortorvet, Oslo the 1st Tuesday of every month, but it was a old listing (last updated 06). Not sure how far that is from you.

Again, awesome job on letting so many words come out of your imagination to form a story. Very few have the talent or drive to do it.

well, back in the day, they paid by the word...not sure if they still do.

While I doubt you'll have major problems with any book offering, you will have to deal with editors (a love hate relationship for any author), and they may change one or two words...

Great work. I've never done more than about 20 pages...

I believe L Ron Hubbard's Battlefield Earth was about 420,000 words. And the ten-part Mission: Earth was 1.2 million words.

By comparison, The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy (the original novel) was 50,000 words.

My own space-adventure novel, which I finished recently, is about 66,000 words (minus glossary, etc), but it is to be the first of a five part series (3 sequels and at least one prequel).

Here's some links of note:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Length_of_a_novel

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_longest_novels

OI! Moon dropping? Great minds think alike...

That's quite awesome though, I'm only about 29K into the current one. Total, over the past ten years, the storyline has evolved so many times though, so that's the only incarnation I can count.

I'd love to get to 500K... that'd be BRILLIANT. And if you ever hunt down a publisher, let us know. I for one am always looking for new scifi writers to eat up... err... read up? Oh you get my drill.

Though it'd have to be an English translation... darn. A good story always looses something in translation... maybe I'll learn Norwegian now. I'm a language nutter.

Well, if we're going to be bragging about tropes, my own novel has at least five other sentient races other than humanity and brainwashing. Nothing so dramatic as a Colony Drop, though. But some other stuff (which I am not going to say here for fear of spoilers) that is less used in science-fiction. I'm just waiting for my draft to come back from the audience sample.

the only sci-fi i read, was hitchhikers guide to the galaxy. altho i write a sci-fi-comedy, mine is in no way similar since i was frankly not so enormously impressed. "silly humor" isnt my thing.

sci-fi's such as star trek and star wars have served as inspiration only for some parodies that i do, otherwise its pretty much my own stuff, since i neither read, watch or even like sci-fi
its just that i LIKE space, and i want my story to take place there. im very sure i have many sci-fi elements included, simply cus many of them make sense, such as "energy shields" covering space-vessels, superluminar travel (which i refuse to explain, in the story)

to put it like this: my battle scenes are based MORE on the somali civil war, than on star wars. if you get my drift. i use NO lasers. there are NO robes or "high/hightech priests" or "dark lords" or tricky diplomatic "on screen" situations (how the hell do they have compatible graphics renderers??? )

radiowaves are more basic, and they use those to communicate between ships of different technologies. in many places ive combined technology reversal with hightechness.

more than anything, my story is about passing time, changes and adaptation. both physical and mental adaptation, as characters need to adapt to living for millennia (due to a genetic change ), rule interplanetary unions, command huge armies, cope with defeats and setbacks but also cope with glory and such.

i think that is inspired, of all places, from elfquest, which i loved as a kid: in elfquest they NEVER return to "the way they were" because the theme is coping with changes, and adapting to them - not to fix a problem and then return to the status quo.

welp, that's the beauty of setting up your own literary world; you set the rules, you tell the story...

Wow!

Congrats.

If I was a hungry money-eating type of filmmaker, I would snatch this novel from you, and turn it into a film. But as I'm the opposite, I'd leave it alone. I don't know why filmmakers, and screenwriters completely bastardize novels, and destroy fans, but that's another story.

haha you think like me, while typing up one day there was a movie on tv (american movie... ) about an author writing a book. i thought "hey!" and gave it a half-watch

but it struck me the... automatic assumption, given by the movie/makers of this movie - that ALL authors simply MUST be dreaming about maximum fame and fimlatization.
it struck me as fascinating, that these people cannot even BEGIN to imagine, an attitude where you write for the sake of writing, it was bade obvious that you write for money, why else?

in the end, he ditched the "bad guys" the big hollywood movie makers, and went for a more humble "right-for-tv" moviemakers, so... the ultimate point was that the HUMBLEST of all the authors in the universe, he will settle for a right-for-tv-movie

fascinating mindsets they got...

personally, as you say, a MOVIE about my dearest characters that WILL be over my cold dead body

lol nice.

If I make it in the Indie Film industry, I dare not touch a novel/franchise and turn it into a Film/TV Movie at all. I write ideas of my own. You know? The ones that fall out of...ooh, what's it called...A Mind?

There, that wasn't too hard was it? Shame the likes of Michael Bay can't do that.

yeah, the best movies are ideas FOR a movie, you plan each work of art, and use the correct medium for each one.

imagine david lynch's "eraserhead" as a novel

in my novel, one thing i do is to cut a bit down on visual descriptions. i am very brief, at most a sentence or two to describe an entire city, landscape or space vessel, cus i go by colors "athmospheres" the general mood. suits and equipment and guns arent described at all, at most VERY briefly "a short rifle" and characters are at most described by one or two visual features, that in themselves can be ambigious. and the reader is prompted to go for the best thing they imagine

how do you make a movie out of that, without corrupting the entire idea? and thats just ONE example.

I do want my novel to be adapted into a film sooner or later, but I would want to be heavily involved in the process, particularly in terms of writing the screenplay and helping guide production design and casting.

to be deeply involved in the process is better than just giving it away i guess

quick update!

btw, Oregon, i will probably go for the big safe publishers, rather than to experiment around w so much effort. i feel like im putting it at risk, especially if i am to showcase it around for free before publishing. i dont want to mail it anywhere at all, only deliver hard copies in established publishers. norway has some 2-3 big ones, and several small ones, so... ill try around along the long road, before trying shortcuts and stuff. anything that takes place online terrifies me

a friend of mine asked for a copy, i sent him one. another friend asked for a copy for him and his brother. i refused sorry, but no, cus i cant have peoples brothers and aunts and cousins getting a copy, before i know it, i have NO control over where it is, at any given time.
right now, i know where _every_ digital copy exists. (precisely cus there are only 2 except for mine)

anyway, this friend who got to read it, he read 30 pages today and reported back.
now i dont read novels, i dont read or even watch sci-fi, i just wrote from my mind, and used the language i felt was the best to use to tell my story, so ive been REALLY curious, have i written half a million words of crap?
reading through it myself lifted my spirits a bit, cus to ME it worked well.
this friend of mine replied today, and being one who has a REALLY hard time complimenting others, he shocked me by saying it was VERY good, and that i had nothing to worry about quality-wise :-O

that was REALLY cool to be told!