2014-12-31 12:30 - Expiration Day sequel - progress

The Christmas holiday was obviously made for writing. Working on the Expiration Day sequel, I reached the 55,000 word milestone yesterday, with a 2,000 word marathon. Why is that important? - because that's a sort-of minimum length for a publishable YA novel. Two downsides: a) I haven't actually got a complete end-to-end narrative and b) I know already I'm going to have to junk some of what's been written.

Actually a lot of that will actually end up on the cutting-room floor, as it's full of infodumps and point-of-view shifts that work fine in "regular" SF, but are often seen as too confusing for mainstream YA. Despite the fact that award-winning YA such as Malorie Blackman's Noughts and Crosses does exactly that. But if your start point for YA is The Hunger Games , with its single, first-person PoV, then I agree that tracking five PoV strands is going to be hard work.

So I'm thinking of those extra PoV strands as helping me to build the structure of the novel. Like research, like the infodumps, it'll all be pruned away when the novel gets to the editing stage. Like an iPhone, the end-product novel will be beautifully shiny and simple, with all the hard work hidden away, and only I and my editor will ever know it was there.