I’ve been toying around with (another) story idea and had the idea of doing up the first chapter and putting it up on the website as an introduction to it.
The scene was all laid out in my mind so I sat down and did up a rough outline of it, including at points as simple dot points. In the end I had expected the final product would be about 5000 words – a good, but not lengthy intro to the story.
When I finally finished the outline it had reached 4250 words already. I can’t see the final, rewritten and detailed scene to be anything less than 10,000 words now, much more than I had expected, and what is more a character who wasn’t really meant to be one sat up and introduced himself.
All he was meant to be was a minor background character who was in the scene to help expand on some plot exposition without resorting to a sheer info dump. Not only is he trying to progress beyond that but, oddly, it helped clear up a few loose ends about why the story was taking place and the broader picture of the shape of the world at large.
Odd how that happens at times.
Mist and Shadows 