Some Ballad of the Dawn Shenanigans · 5:06pm Dec 21st, 2017
So I finally finished the rough draft of Chapter 4 of Ballad of the Dawn. Honestly, it was a hard chapter to get through because, A) I needed to get someplace in the story in that chapter and B) there's a lot of character introductions to pad out their arrival to the story destination. It took me almost all month to finish the dang thing, and I'm finally where I want to be.
However, as I went back to figure out how long the chapter was, I was first counting pages. The first ten going back were understandable; I've been averaging about ten pages each chapter. The first fifteen I was starting to think it was getting a little lengthy, as my longest is sixteen pages at this point. The first twenty I start laughing to myself, wondering how much stuff I put in there that I might want to cut out.
Chapter 4 clocked in at about 25 pages. A normal novel-sized chapter. But this is longer than any chapter that I've ever written prior. The closest is Guardians of Tartarus, with its abundant dialogue and weird speech patterns bringing it around 20 pages, although the story altogether was only 7k-8k words. So, I decided to do a wordcount for the whole chapter.
Chapter 4 then clocked in at about 12.5k words. It's the longest chapter that I've ever written so far, without a doubt. For comparison, Crusaders' Curse had a total word count of about 25k words. That chapter in itself is half the length of my first finished novella. I'm glad I finally moved the story along, but this gif just about sums up how I feel about the whole affair:
