The Long and the Short of it

Over the past couple of days I've been procrastinating. Not an unusual thing for me. I've actually been doing some quite useful stuff while I've been 'not writing', in that I've made inroads into some long needed tidying up and sorting out of both my web site and the book sidebar on this blog. You probably won't notice a great deal of difference in either of them, but it's part of a process of creating more order and uniformity [don't laugh]. It's not finished yet, but both in the blog bar and on the homepage of my site, I've been streamlining links and centralizing all the info for each book on its own individual excerpt page, hence the sudden appearance of a smattering of 'Info/Excerpt/Buy' type clickables [that one leads to IN TOO DEEP, picked at random].

Anyway, while I've been engaged in all this techy/semi creative type activity, hopefully my higher brain function [yeah, right...] will have been mulling over thoughts and issues to do with IN THE FLESH aka Victorianoid. The main thing at the moment is that it's turning out as if it's going to be far too long! I always start out each book worrying if I'm going to 'get the wordcount' ie. whether my undeniably tissue paper flimsy plots will stretch to the required number of words for the publisher's guidelines. I do always manage it, because all sorts of things occur to me as I'm writing and the stories usually turn out richer than I dared dream of when I began... But this time, with IN THE FLESH, I seem to be heading for a massive over-run if I don't streamline the plot a bit. Yes, even the slight plot I've developed for this one seems to be very complex by my standards and needs a goodish bit of wordage. Plus, it's a historical, and the defining historical characteristics of setting and world-building are like extra characters and plot twists in themselves. So they need space too.

So, it's a question of constant monitoring and balancing... One thing that HAS to stay in is masses of delicious, naughty sensuality between my characters, and their emotional and psychological voyage of discovery. Those elements are the bedrock and the raison d'etre [oooh, posh] of my writing and my readers expect and are entitled to those elements... in very large amounts!

I can do this. [I once wrote a 100,000 word long book under another pseudonym] And the challenge is exciting and fun and good for me because I need to grow as a writer. But it does need a fair bit of brain bashing and the occasional step back to review and reassess. Which is what I've been doing these last few days... And the good thing about a little 'holiday' from the writing is, I'm absolutely dying to get back to Beatrice and Mr. Ritchie and find out what incredibly sexy and scandalous thing they're going to do next!