Recasting "A Far Sun"

I've been working madly on my story. I haven't made as much progress forward as I'd anticipated, but working with my wife I have made some very important progress.

First, I started reading it aloud to her. It's practice for when/if I podcast the story, and the reading helps me find and fix all the places where the prose is awkward or stilted. If I can't read it smoothly with all the right inflection, then there's something wrong that needs to be fixed.

There are a few reasons why I'm reading it to her. First is that it helps me. That I've covered, above. Secondly, she is an English Literature major, and therefore "an expert." Believe me, she snags a lot of problem areas I miss, and the story keeps getting better. Less fluff, more stuff. Thirdly, she suggested I convert the story into YA--Young Adult. Because of the premise and the characters, that is turning out to be a really good idea. The only problems I've run into are the few spots where adult things were handled in an "adult" manner. A little too much graphic detail, even though I had practically no graphic detail at all. With her cogent suggestions I've been fixing the adult interactions to be a little less literal.

The final motive for my reading the story is so she can help me work out the last ten to fifteen chapters. As a critic of fiction she's quite good, and I am very lucky to have her "on board" helping me. Makes my decision to marry her a couple years ago look pretty smart. But I digress.

So, we've read up to page 450, or so, out of about 750 pages of manuscript. So far. I hate to estimate how much is remaining because of my dismal abilities to predict the length. I always think it's going to be shorter than it ends up being. I might hope it will be only ten chapters more, but in reality it will probably be more like twenty. At 3K per chapter, that's 60K words on top of 143K.

She has suggested ending the first "book" when my heroes get to the village. It's really not an ending, but it is at the 39K word point, which would be a good length. And it would definitely spur the reader to get the next book in the series. For grins I've looked at other points throughout that could become "endings." I suppose I could break this thing down into 40K "chunks," but really the stuff set up in the very beginning doesn't get resolved until the 200K word point. For YA this would be a very large book, but I think getting it written is probably more important than worrying about the length, right now. Besides, my wife is quite interested in the story, and really wants to see (hear?) how it comes out.

Stay tuned.