950,000

There's a variation of that "thousand hours of practice" going around, designed for writers; that you need to write a million words of shit first.

So I was going to do a giveaway or promotion or something for Fox and Hounds and decided I couldn't stand the cover any more. Tried Fiverrrr once more and got offered a very simple tinkering that actually seems to solve several of the problems I had.

While I was doing that, I went ahead and hired someone to do a light developmental edit pass on the first book. Since that is the jump-on point for the entire series anyhow (and I really should have thought of this before I went and gave away a bunch of copies on Goodreads).

Incidentally, it is hard to tell from the raw numbers but people are removing the book from their "want to read" list and the "reading it now" number is going up and down and this might mean people are reading it. Or at least opening it, then giving up after a few pages. A new reader claims to be reading the second book in the series now but according to KDP there's been no purchases recently.

In any case! I re-read The Fox Knows Many Things, all the way through in one day. Every time I re-read I see something new, but this time my big, big impression was...

I must have started writing at the 950,000 word mark.

Because it starts weak. It is not well written. It starts to crawl up about half-way through Germany, is getting better through Italy, spikes upwards again when she is in Athens and finally turns into a half-way decent book over 2/3 of the way through, meeting locals through her new friends Biro and "Achilles" and getting caught up in one of the Prespa Agreement riots.

And it also seems pretty much un-editable. There's some small stuff I can do. I have a huge list of small stuff, both for this book and for A Fox's Wedding (for instance, the Geek Anthem scene in Akiba, change "Ode to Joy" to English. Yes, it is sung there in German and there's a very cool historical reason for it but since I had no time to put that reason in the book, it is better to lie a little about reality and make it a better experience for the reader.)

I thought I had some easy cuts; cut the Stoa museum scene with Océane, cut the spinnaker scene on the Wayfarer, etc. But those turn out to be only a few hundred words and there's insufficient benefit to pacing in taking them out. I wish I could red-pencil half of the White Supremacist stuff because it plays better hinted at then belabored, but that's a lot of work that could be better spent writing a different book.

***

Oh, yeah. By checking out a new book from Jason Colavito I somehow jiggled the algorithm and Amazon has gone and told me that consciously retro -- and just a little bit Sad Puppy -- SF is a popular flavor this week. Possibly not with readers. But I am far from the first author to think about it.

You know that theory that it isn't Great Men, but that there is something floating in the zeitgeist that means this was the moment for Fauvism to arrive or Natural Selection to be proposed? Yeah, this is what it feels like to be the other guys who were just starting to think about the speed of light when a certain patent clerk beat them to it.