I have got all kinds of feelings about long these days, because I have found out that readers purely don't notice -- The March North is forty-four percent the length of A Succession of Bad Days; readers notice "longer", but they don't notice "more than twice" -- and I have also found out that edits don't scale linearly at all. It's not even that "twice as long is four times the work" (though it might be); it's that the length and the editing effort don't match.
And the cost is linear, for the edits; that both seems unfair (to all involved, but particularly the editor) and like a reason to write shorter books. Though it doesn't seem to get into the writing process at all; the next one is short (86 kwords) but the one after that is going to be a brick. (Six expected parts. First draft -- and they always get longer! -- of one part is 42 kwords. Simple extrapolation says eep!)
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I have got all kinds of feelings about long these days, because I have found out that readers purely don't notice -- The March North is forty-four percent the length of A Succession of Bad Days; readers notice "longer", but they don't notice "more than twice" -- and I have also found out that edits don't scale linearly at all. It's not even that "twice as long is four times the work" (though it might be); it's that the length and the editing effort don't match.
And the cost is linear, for the edits; that both seems unfair (to all involved, but particularly the editor) and like a reason to write shorter books. Though it doesn't seem to get into the writing process at all; the next one is short (86 kwords) but the one after that is going to be a brick. (Six expected parts. First draft -- and they always get longer! -- of one part is 42 kwords. Simple extrapolation says eep!)