What’s on my mind? Why, thank you! Yes, I am Nicole Parton! How kind of you to notice! Pardon? A book? Yes, I have written a book! It’s called The Butterfly Box. Terrified? Yes, I am a little (a lot) terrified to submit it to agents. Why? Because a trusted reader said it was too long. It needs to be what’s called a “standard length” for its genre.
This sea of sweat? That’s nothing. I’m preparing for my afternoon swimming lesson! (Yikes! They’re on to me ...)
I recently came across some poor sot’s plea for tips on how to shorten her book to a more marketable length. I was that sot. Still am.
After each day of trying, I left my laptop for a little scotch and a big cry. I’ve been doing this for the past three months. So I skipped over trying to condense the description of my 94,000-word novel (soon to be an 88,000-word novel) into the one or two paragraphs necessary for the inside of a dust jacket.
Instead, I thought about myself – you know, the stuff where authors write third-person descriptions of their glamorous lives. Example: Suzy Schmerringer and Bo, her cocker-doodle-schnitzel-terrier (crossed with a sheep-a-doodle) divide their time between homes in San Francisco and Nantucket, where Suzy enjoys long walks on deserted beaches and Bo diddles and doodles. Woo-hoo! 38 words.
Then I thought: Gee … Maybe a literary agent would still find this too wordy. So I eliminated the part about Bo (who, to be honest, died 16 years ago and never set foot on a beach because of a teensy-weensy bowel problem I won’t get into here, but ask your vet about parasites in cocker-doodle-schnitzel-terriers crossed with sheep-a-doodles).
And then I thought: Gee, again … Maybe 38 words to describe myself and more words to describe my book and the b-i-g problem with the length of the book is just too many words altogether. So I polished and pared and perfected my book’s length, its title, and its dust-jacket description to just one word: The.
My sister, who is one of my book’s test readers and sometime-editors, approves the changes. “Nice to see the book so much shorter,” she said. “Also nice to see the new title end with a dot. That makes it a four-letter word.”
© Nicole Parton, 2019
